A product for payment specialists

Overview

Dojo strategically partnered with a third-party payment processor to launch and scale quickly. This resulted in rapid growth across the UK & Europe.

For internal teams like Payment Operations, Risk, Treasury, Chargebacks, Incident Management, Collections, and Customer Support this meant using a number of different tools and systems to manage and support our customers.

As Dojo embarked on creating its own payments platform, it required a clear strategy to ensure scalable growth and equip internal teams with the tools needed to maintain exceptional customer support. The goal was to seamlessly migrate customers without disrupting their experience.

My contribution

Product strategy User research Product design

The team

1 x Product Design Lead 1 x Product Lead 1 x Business Analyst 2 x FE Engineers 2 x BE Engineers

Year

2023

Process

Key Problems

Internal teams at Dojo rely on a variety of systems to support customers, access data and control important business processes. While these systems meet basic functional needs, they are slow to navigate, restricted by limited licenses, lack interoperability, and fall short in good UX and UI's.

These inefficiencies created fragmented workflows, delays, data inaccuracies, and reduced trust in our systems. The ripple effects of these issues not only hinder internal operations but also indirectly impact the quality of service delivered to customers.

Kicking off the work

We spent time with the individuals of each team listening and learning about how they do their job, what's important, what motivates them and the pains and challenges they faced.

This was a series of one-to-one interviews, multiple Miro boards, and group workshops. This gave us deeper insight into these problems - but more importantly we were able to dive into the granular details about the micro interactions across the multiple systems and understand their workflow when supporting customers. The workshops included all team members, including the engineers so they could hear these experiences first hand and build empathy.

User interviews conducted with members of different teams, in-person and remotely - all scripts and goals of the sessions created by me.

What did we uncover

We discovered additional challenges, including inconsistent data across systems, delays in data updates and limited data availability. We also uncovered the need for real-time transaction monitoring, quick-action controls, advanced filtering, a clear hierarchy of information, and smoother navigation between pages.

Some of these issues were addressed in the first version, while others were prioritised for future updates.

An example of the different tools and actions needed to monitor if payouts were being generated and sent to banking partners to pay customers.
Looker reports were used to monitor if Dojo's banking partners were accepting the daily payouts necessary to ensure customers received their payments. However, this process was overwhelming and challenging to navigate.
This was the process required to retry a payment if it had failed e.g. if a customers bank did not accept a payment for any reason, or for technical reasons.

Testing the designs

I created prototypes to address the overlapping needs for information and functionality across multiple teams. To do this, I designed, prototyped and tested user journeys tailored to specific tasks for each team, such as viewing transactions, processing refunds, and managing settlements or payouts. These tests revealed usability issues, gaps in information, confusing terminology, and flaws in the information hierarchy. Using this feedback, I made iterations to these designs and refined these with the team to be broken down into epics for implementation.

Examples of the interview scripts used for testing purposes here & here

Outcome

Working closely with the Product Lead and Engineers, we developed and delivered the first version of this product within three months which allowed Dojo to migrate the first 1000 customers onto its new payment platform, monitored through this product. This phase required close collaboration with our platform teams, as they provided the data processing layer which served as the source of truth. This included mapping complex scheme codes and functionality to more user-friendly terminology for our internal teams.

The outcome for our customers was exactly as intended - seamless. There was zero disruption to their service, and the migration was entirely invisible to them.

100% of all UK customers have been migrated on to Dojo's new payments platform which is over 100,000 customers. At the end of 2024 over £3,000,000,000 had been paid out to customers all monitored through this product.

The journey wasn’t without its challenges and this product was just one part of the solution. The entire tribe came together to problem-solve, adapt, and push forward. Each hurdle only strengthened our determination to deliver for our customers—and we did just that!