Reducing help requests for StudyGroup’s payment system

I helped create a payment system that reduced requests while increasing the number of students who successfully completed their payments.

By Andrei Vidaicu
September 21, 2022

PayOnline enables students to view their account summary, track their payments, check outstanding balances, and more importantly pay their fees. Agents are also able to perform these actions on behalf of the students.

The user interface of the previous system was outdated, cumbersome, and non-responsive. It lacked modern usability standards, making it difficult for users to navigate and complete tasks efficiently. This led to an increase in the number of support tickets, primarily due to user interface issues.

The team for the project included a business analyst, a project manager, five engineers, the head of IT Solutions and myself as the lead UX/UI designer.

Problem with the application fee

To reduce the number of support requests submitted by agents and improve resource efficiency and boost conversion rates, I looked at addressing the challenges agents/students faced when paying application fees.

Approach

Working against a tight deadline, to get a better understanding of the problem space, I:

reviewed the old system and noted its strengths and weaknesses.
tested the old legacy system with an agent and three students.
synthesized the information we had gathered.
created a customer journey map.
organized a team meeting to decide what to focus on first.
created a user flow diagram illustrating how agents and students navigate through the system, followed by a testable low-fidelity mockup.

The image below depicts the ideal student journey within PayOnline, showcasing both single and multiple destination country options in the user flow.

One of the key priorities from the ideation workshop was:

What is the most efficient way to display application fees per destination country?

Initially, we displayed the countries in a select list alongside the application fees on the same page. The fees would only appear once a selection had been made. However, this approach had a downside: students might mistakenly believe they were required to pay for all the countries they had selected.
We split this into two steps to clarify that only one selection can be made, thus reducing cognitive load.

The final payment details screen.

Conclusion

This project highlighted how catering for the user needs helped align with the business objectives. We identified pain points through usability testing and used other forms of user research to address their challenges. Simplifying the payment flow and country selection reduced confusion. Close collaboration between design, business, and engineering teams created an intuitive experience that reduced support requests and improved efficiency.

View the high fidelity prototype (Desktop)

Next case study: Unifying student application forms