Quickteller Business: Rebuilding Africa's largest payment portal
August 2019 - August 2020
Rebuilding Interswitch’s merchant portal to improve customer satisfaction amid growing competition in the market.
Team
Interswitch 🇳🇬
Working full-time on-site as the Design Team Lead for the Merchant 360 project from the Interswitch HQ in Lagos, Nigeria.
Platform
Web
Contributions
Design leadership, Information architecture design, Visual design, prototyping, Interaction design
Tacking up a unicorn
Interswitch offers several personal and business finance products, including its Verve payment cards and the Quickteller brand. The company reached unicorn status after partnering with Visa in 2019, surpassing a billion US Dollars in valuation. In spite of this success, the firm is beginning to lose some of its brand equity amongst new customers to younger startups like Paystack and Flutterwave.
My primary responsibility at Interswitch was to redesign the Quickteller Business portal — a payment processing and tracking tool used by thousands of merchants across Africa.
As any merchant who has ever used QTB knows, it can be quite difficult to set up. However, once you have it figured out, you can run your business with the lowest fees in the market. In a saturated marketplace with a growing list of enticing alternatives, most merchants are less willing to put in that effort, so it was time for QTB to adapt to meet their needs.
Goal
Redesign Quickteller Business in collaboration with the Interswitch development and research team, as part of a larger overhaul of Interswitch products, to improve customer experience and help the company stay ahead of the curve amid growing competition from new startups in the market.
Outcome
We built a more intuitive product, eliminating several onboarding bottlenecks and helped merchants set up shop quicker. Within the first year of the relaunch (2021-2022) quickteller business recorded a 35% increase in sign up rates with over 40K new merchants in the first year.
Gathering context
QTB requirement gathering workshop (August 2019)
QTB requirement gathering workshop (August 2019)
“Running a business is hard enough, starting one shouldn’t be.”
The outcome of my preliminary workshops & research, and the defining hypothesis of the redesign was that; by enabling merchants onboard quicker and making the application more intuitive, we would reduce churn. This was validated using merchant interviews and data analysis by the user research team before, during, and after the redesign. The participants of the usability report included businesses like:
Asher’s Place – Individual Account
Earthways Farm Shop Limited – Small Business
Payporte - Medium Business
BetKing – Large Business
We intended to rebuild the portal to work for the merchant and not the other way round. This way it would remain easy to use regardless of the size of your business.
A new design language
The QTB project was the perfect opportunity to drive the adoption of a new design language at Interswitch. The firm was moving to overhaul its product line, so we laid the foundations for the colours, typography, and style, from the complex navigation and copy to something a lot easier to use and nicer to look at.
Managing payment links - Previous QTB design (2015–2020)
Managing payment links - Current QTB design (2020)
While we sought to reduce the complexity of the product, new features were also introduced where it made sense, in response to a shift in user expectations. Subscription payments and more control with payment links (features that are possible with Paystack and Fluterwave) are examples. The biggest challenge was to ensure QTB was simple enough for smaller merchants to use without taking out the features that larger organisations have come to love it for.
Screenshots of the QTB style-guide
Prototyping
Prototyping was essential on this project because the previous design had little to no micro-interactions, making it feel clunky and unresponsive and we wanted to improve that. The inclusion of subtle movements gave more life to the product, making it easier to navigate and show success and failure. Shadows also played a big part in indicating the depth of content and giving user feedback across the application.
prototype: interaction with text input
prototype: creating a subscription plan
Conclusion
This was a very important project for me, and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to be a part of it. I learnt a lot more about payment processes, the needs of different types of merchants, and the balance between providing value for the client and the customer in the B2B industry. The portal was relaucnched .