Background
Brails was launched with a clear mission: to streamline cross-border payments for businesses. It enables businesses to send, receive, hold, and spend money in multiple currencies from a single account.
Despite offering some of the lowest fees in the market, Brails began losing its customers to competitors. Customer support logs highlighted recurring complaints and repetitive questions about navigating the platform, signalling potential usability issues.
Recognizing these issues, Brails needed to refine its user experience to better meet customer’s needs and drive adoption.
Team
Brails
Apr 2024 - Jun 2024
Period
Platform
Web
Design leadership, Product design, Information architectural design, Prototyping, User research, Research synthesis
Contributions
Goal
Enhance Brails platform in collaboration with the development team to deliver a seamless customer experience, addressing usability issues, and positioning the company ahead of the curve in a competitive market.
Outcome
We created a more intuitive platform, resolving several usability challenges and enabling businesses to set up accounts more quickly. By the second round of user testing, the Brails dashboard achieved a usability score of 79.5% based on user feedback. Within seven months of these improvements, Brails recorded a 30% increase in user growth, including key players like Strike, Zebedee, and CoinCorner.
“If you are customer first instead of product first, success and money will follow”
— DMA Anderson, Founder & CEO - Korgi
Rolling up my sleeves
Customer support logs highlighted recurring complaints and repetitive questions about navigating the Brails platform, suggesting that the platform’s user experience was a barrier to adoption. To validate this hypothesis and identify specific pain points, the team conducted focused research, gathering data to inform improvements and better align the platform with merchant needs.
Before talking to any of the customers, I put together a research plan with the help of my teammates to define clear goals to guide the project, draft my interview script, select participants and schedule interview sessions.
We interviewed 15 businesses of different sizes ranging from small to medium and large scale businesses to get a diverse perspective of how they interact with the platform and identify specific pain points, confusion, or inefficiencies that they may encounter. The intention was to refine Brails 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.
Conducting user interviews
After the sessions, I listened through the recordings, summarised my findings and grouped them. Grouping feedback from the sessions helped me draft a comprehensive list of pain points and opportunities that helped put the needs of the businesses into perspective or in one voice - so to speak.
Research Insights
Proposed Solutions
It was important that whatever solution i came up with allowed businesses to complete the account creation process seamlessly as well as navigate the platform without much assistance. To make more informed decisions, I took a look at similar fintech products to see what i could learn from them, this helped me come up with the following solutions;
Account Creation
We had to take into consideration the requirements for verifying each of these businesses as we came to the realization that it wasn't a one-size-fits-all process. To streamline the experience, we made sure to collect only the information absolutely necessary for each business type so we could reduce churn and drop-offs.
Previous ‘account creation’ flow for small businesses
Improved ‘account creation’ flow for small businesses
Keeping in mind that this product should simplify cross-border payments for businesses, I removed all elements that were not immediately needed on the home screen. I redesigned it to focus on what was essential: displaying all available wallets and their balances, recent transactions, and a much-requested currency converter.
Dashboard
Previous Brails Dashboard
Improved Brails Dashboard
Businesses could initially only convert currencies during the swap flow, which was difficult to locate and frustrating for those managing multiple currencies. To address this issue, we made the currency converter a standalone feature that is easy to use and quick to access.
Currency Converter
While we sought to reduce the complexity of the product, new features were also introduced where they made sense, in response to a shift in user expectations. The biggest challenge was ensuring that Brails maintained the simplicity and features that smaller businesses have come to love, even as we worked to meet the standards of larger enterprises.
Conclusion
Working on this project was an incredibly rewarding experience, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute to it. I gained valuable insights into payment processes, the importance of thorough research, and the need to design with diverse business requirements in mind. This experience not only honed my design and research skills but also reinforced how user-centered solutions, even small adjustments, can significantly enhance adoption and satisfaction.