~60%
Reported improvement in disbursement speed after the redesign.Faster disbursement
Reinventing payables.
In late 2020 Kargo set out to reinvent its platform. The existing system had run into scalability limits, and enough problems had piled up that expanding into a new vertical would have broken it.
Some numbers, data, and statements have been altered to respect confidentiality agreements.
- My role
- Product Designer, Researcher
- Project type
- Redesign, Interaction Design, Payment Dashboard
- Collaborators
- Engineers, Product Manager, Operations, Accounts Payable, Finance
- Date & place
- January–March 2021 · Kargo Technologies
Summary
How might we create a robust payment system that is accurate, fast, reliable, integrated, and scalable?
Rather than patch the payment dashboard again, we rebuilt the platform so that every module could be reworked. I owned the payment module inside the payment platform squad — specifically the disbursement system, the foundational module the rest of it would sit on.
Outcome
~75%
Payment requests rejected each month for the wrong disbursement amount.Fewer rejected payments
100%
Every disbursement now runs on the platform, up from roughly 70%.Disbursement in-platform
Final output
Fast, accurate, reliable, efficient
The new information architecture and infrastructure were rebuilt so the system works around the user. Data is reachable in one click instead of a dozen tabs, tax variables are embedded in the payment scheme, and redundant pages were replaced with access limits and status combinations.
Also measured
- Payment request accuracy improved by roughly 80%.
- Transporter complaints about payment amounts and transfer details dropped by about 90%.
Say goodbye to manual tax calculation
Calculating tax is now a couple of clicks. Truck documents no longer live in a separate Google Drive either — they can be opened straight from the license plate.
Fee review and payment requests, a few clicks away
Validating a fee request is smooth now. Reviewers move through documents and their requirements in one place, because every document is centralized and attached to its fee type.
No more wrong disbursement amounts
Disbursement amounts can be adjusted at the stages that allow it — and nowhere else. The main shipment fee is generated automatically from the disbursement stage set in the scheme, and it is immutable, so typos stop causing rejected payment requests.
Design process overview
A literal embodiment of quick fixes
It's a literal embodiment of quick fixes.
That was the most concise description of our payment dashboard at the time. These were the first impressions of the system at a glance:
- A replication of Excel sheets
- Decentralized document management
- Unstandardized inputs and flows
- Prone to disbursement errors, because the amount to disburse was free text input
Discovery
I partly contributed to this mess — I knew the risk of a quick fix and saw the signs, but didn't act on them during my first three months in the payment squad. So the offensive tone is necessary. We learned it the hard way.
Once we had identified the surface problems, I planned the discovery side of the project.
Opportunity finding
Looking at each problem on its own, every one of them looked straightforward to fix. But we had already learned that another quick fix fixes nothing, so we tied the pieces into a single story and worked out where to intervene:
- Build a new module for payment schedules so payments can scale
- Streamline the whole process, rather than improving the interface for its own sake
We also sharpened the project goals so we could work backwards from them.
I drafted design principles to keep us pointed at those goals, and the team agreed on them before the delivery kick-off.
Delivery
Solution validation leaned on the funnel technique in qualitative usability tests with operational staff, plus design reviews with upper management — breaking down and prioritizing macro and micro jobs-to-be-done for each role.
Final output
A sample result from the whole process:
Learning
- The importance of design principles
- Conceptual thinking matters in this kind of project
- Hypothesis-driven design
- Contextual design framework and information architecture management
- Stakeholder management and facilitation
- Systems thinking — how things affect each other
- Testing method exploration and rapid feedback
