Mark B. Tegtmeier
While working with a major international retailer, I took the lead on designing both consumer- and employee-facing experiences related to store gift cards as part of the Payments IT team. These experiences included new card applications, application status checks, printing temporary cards, and payments on account.
Affinity mapping usability research findings in Miro prior to making recommendations.
The retailer, in partnership with the card-issuing Fortune 50 bank began a project to enable credit card applications at the retailer’s self-checkout machines. This system was being built when I joined the team. I worked closely with a designer on the checkout team to identify concerns with the UI and customer experience, including localization issues. No usability testing had been conducted on this product, so we worked together to conduct one, synthesized the data, and made data-based recommendations to the stakeholders from all parties.
The Self-Checkout Application program was set to be translated for Spanish-speaking users in Puerto Rico and the US mainland. I ensured all verbiage was translation-ready and fit the targeted locales. It also required changes to the UI to accommodate the text expansion of Spanish, which can easily cause buttons and headers to break.
Our self-checkout stations in store also required accessibility considerations in the design of all screens, due to the difficulty for customers in wheelchairs to reach higher parts of the screen. Unfortunately, the physical environment could not easily be changed. As a fix, I designed on-screen controls to be accessible and within reach to customers in wheelchairs.
In addition to mid-point work on the self-checkout credit card application, I provided research and recommendations for the associate-facing experience of selling credit cards, application intake, application status checks and support, printing temporary cards, and taking payments on customer credit accounts.
Previously, these tasks had to be completed in different areas of the store, on different machines, and in different applications. I distilled our research data into user jobs to better understand the underlying needs, which extended beyond simply replacing the existing system.
Our efforts aim to help the retailer and partner bank increase new credit card member application channels, decrease abandonment rates for self-service applications, increase customer satisfaction, and decrease employee interventions and minimize impact to self-service checkout time.