Company
Mastercard
Industry
B2B
Fintech
Services
Product design
Platform
Web app
My role
Product designer
Timeline
Feb 2022 - Jul 2022
Setting up a new business relationship with Mastercard wasn’t always easy for our customers. Our team took a convoluted onboarding process and turned it into an award-winning experience.
As a product designer on the team, I helped:
connect 10 separate systems used by more than 13 internal teams
remove the need for customers to juggle disjointed emails, spreadsheets, questionnaires, forms, and agreements
elevate visibility of process status and completion time to increase customer confidence
craft content that was intuitive to our customers that reduced human error
make our language more inclusive for diverse users
The challenge
Onboarding is complicated and confusing. The process is unclear, fragmented, and manual for our customers.
There is no consolidated view or location for them to navigate their relationship path with Mastercard.
Customers interact with multiple teams through different channels, often having to re-enter data.
These channels involve systems that are often not in sync.
Technical language would hinder customer process.
The goal
The onboarding process needed to be simplified. We had to digitize it into an experience that customers would access through our B2B hub, Mastercard Connect.
We wanted to have one consolidated view for both customers and internal users, allowing them to interact more fluidly. This would also allow separate internal teams to track each others’ progress.
For customers, we wanted to guide them through the onboarding workflow so they can:
see where things are and what’s next
complete online forms self-sufficiently
get relevant documentation and resources.
DISCOVERY and research
Learn from internal teams
Internal teams had knowledge of the onboarding process that we didn’t have. We had questions for them, such as:
who are they and what systems are they using?
what are the pain points of internal teams?
how will the new experience impact the work internal teams do?
We conducted interviews with eight internal users representing three teams who owned most of the process. These three teams were:
Franchise
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
The high-level findings from this research revolved around four main categories:
Work distribution
Audit trail and transparency
Approval levels
Communication paradigm
We prioritized our findings based on impact and effort to identify good starting points for our design requirements, as seen below.
IDEATION
User journeys and targeted scenarios
There are over 100 business relationship types (BRTs) that Mastercard has with its various customers. For our initial user journeys, we targeted a few of our most common relationship types in the context of onboarding new companies. For example, most customers begin their relationship starting with Salesforce.
Creating a scalable and modular framework
We knew the solution needed to be flexible, so we started to consider how all of the content for the process could be dynamic based on our customer business relationship type. After examining the documentation and having ideation sessions with our product partners, we opted for framework below.
DESIGN
The landing page
Because our design framework and existing documentation focused on customer-driven content, we led with designing for them. Our initial solution was customer-facing with room to grow into an internal-facing tool using the design requirements we gathered from internal users. However, some of these internal requirements could be addressed now, while others had to be designed for at a later time, such as internal communication functionality and approval levels.
This initial page helped our customers by:
showing the overall progress of the onboarding process
laying out all the necessary steps of the process in an intuitive order
keeping track of module status and what’s been approved
presenting helpful resources for completing the process self-sufficiently
The detail page
We wanted the process to guide customers through a series of plain-language forms in a step-by-step manner. Good content design was a massive part of this project. This experience helped our customers by:
keeping the process bite-sized to not overwhelm them
allowing visibility into remaining progress for each section
speaking in a conversational language they can understand and without technical jargon
providing descriptions to assist them in entering accurate information and a reason of why we’re asking certain questions
leveraging previously shared data to pre-fill form fields, saving time and reducing human error for repetitive tasks
validation
Internal review and customer response
To validate our design direction, stakeholder interviews with internal teams were set up to review both content and design feasibility. Afterwards, the experience and relevant questions were presented to selected customers.
Multiple interview sessions were conducted to review content with our initial internal teams and other stakeholders.
Engineering partner teams were consulted to review design feasibility and to offer advice to ensure technical success before development began.
Lastly, customer participants were selected to get initial impressions in the form of interviews and focus groups.
Both internal teams and customers were largely excited about the design direction of the new onboarding experience. The initial designs were iterated upon from this feedback before preparation for a lengthy development cycle, which is where my time with this project came to a conclusion.
Conclusion
Celebrating success
The company onboarding project was chosen out of six finalists from the ‘Design Impact’ category at our first ever Customer Experience and Design Awards Show in 2022. There were almost 100 projects in the competition across five categories.
Our team was honored to be recognized for this new experience. Shout out to Jen, Priscilla, and Nicki for being amazing partners!
It is currently being implemented in phases and influenced the designs of other products across Mastercard’s digital landscape.
