Quick Pay

Canopy Tax / 2024
Senior Product Manager, Senior UX Designer, Senior Engineers, QA Engineer
Lead designer for the Quick Pay feature
The Team
My Role

Canopy is an accounting practice management software that handles client engagement, document management, workflow, engagements, proposals, and time & billing. We help accountants run their practice.

Problem
We found that some accounting firm’s clients lack the time to log into their client portal, have forgotten their credentials, or face difficulties accessing the client portal. We wanted to create a seamless and secure way for their clients to pay without having to log in.
  • Decrease average time to submit a payment by 30%

    On average, it took 24 days.
Objectives and KPI's

Understanding the Problem

Quick Pay was already on the roadmap when I arrived to Canopy, but whenever I join a company, I like to assess and get a birds eye view of what problems users are encountering. We had a tool called Uservoice that collected feedback from real users and helped us organize requests. Looking at Uservoice, Quick Pay was a large request for our team.
For the sake of this case study, I’m going to call Canopy’s users as accountants. The accountant's users will be referred to as clients.
I conducted stakeholder interviews with our team members (PM, Engineers, QA, and PMM), read through the Uservoice feedback requests, and spoke to our CSMs and support teams. I’m a big fan of collaboration cross departmentally.

The company vision was also aligned to increase payments revenue. A quick and easy payment process helps to improve the overall customer experience. When customers enjoy their experience with our business, they are much more likely to become return customers in the future and refer their peers to us, which translates into more revenue for Canopy.
So what did we do?
Takeaways
All signs were pointing to Quick Pay to be our next focus.

Design Exploration

Low fidelity - Wireframe A
So with the second iteration, I modeled the design after our other secure link experience, Engagements after discussing with other designers. I’m a big fan of following consistency and trying to apply Jakob’s law when I can. Plus, that’s why design systems are so popular and useful!

This design ended up only being two screens for users to go through and took up the entire screen.
Low fidelity - Wireframe B
I also looked at non competitors experiences when it came to “one time payment” or “quick pay” experiences. Think dental or medical bills where you enter a code and pay the bill.

We thought about mirroring that experience, but we felt a code would be another barrier to entry so we landed on adjusting the current email structure since we were aiming for seamless design.
With my first iteration, I attempted to place the designs inside the client portal. But as we continued to iterate and discuss as a team, I started to realize that it was strange to make the experience look like the client portal when in actuality the client was actively trying to avoid the client portal.

This flow ended up having six screens for clients to go through and was a modal experience.
We updated all of the invoice emails to include a “Pay Now” button. That button would then take them into a secure link experience where the client could pay for the invoice without logging in. We also took this opportunity to improve the emails by adding the accountant’s logo and emphasized the invoice balance.
High Fidelity
Deciding to pursue our 2nd concept, here's where we landed regarding the desktop experience.
Emails
Mobile
Don't forget about responsive design! I think the design shines the most in a mobile experience.

Results

We created a seamless experience - our accountants didn’t need to set up anything to receive this update.

Typically I would do user research and usability testing, but this feature was unique in the sense that it impacted our accountant’s users, so we did not have great access to those individuals and we felt that “quick pay” experiences were common in the world already.

Drumroll please... After this feature was released, we decreased the average number of days to submit a payment from 24 to 10 days! It feels great to reduce this metric because accountants can spend more time on the things that matter to them rather than chasing down outstanding invoices. And who doesn’t love to be paid faster?

Takeaways
We decreased the average number of days to submit a payment from 24 to 10 days! That's over 59% percent!
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