Overview  

New payment method design for Japan mobile carrier billing

• User purchases and charges their mobile carrier account.
• User redirected to carrier for authorization.
• High level of state and experience complexity.
• Regional exploratory studies to determine local purchase behavior.
• Follow-up user studies in region for data-driven consensus.
• Design crosses personal ownership boundaries.
• Coordination and collaboration of dozens of teams.
• Approval needed from multiple leadership chains.

Supplemental Axure Documents  

Japan Mobile Carrier Billing – Desktop

Japan Mobile Carrier Billing – Mobile

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In Detail

   In addition to creating the Amazon Payment Experience (APX) product, I was the lead designer for all new payment method creation. Sometimes this was for US based payment products like a new rewards points account but more often it was part of a larger initiative to expand into new regions. This was a very involved process.

     First, I ran exploratory studies in the new region to understand how customers purchased goods online and how they received them. In the United States, online purchases are largely made with major label credit or debit cards. But internationally, this is usually not the case. Each region has a unique way of conceptualizing online commerce and there are often dozens of ways of paying and receiving goods. 

      In Russia for example, fraud is of great concern and cards are not used. Purchases are usually initiated online and generate a code, then the user completes the purchase by walking down to the street and inserting cash into a physical payment device like a reverse ATM, completing the transaction. In the Netherlands, users carry a physical device with them at all times in which they insert a bank card. A code generated by the online purchase is input and the device outputs a second code that is then reentered into the website, virtually eliminating fraud, though cumbersome.

     Multiple experiences were then created in prototype and tested via user studies in the region.  Data was collected and presented.  It was my responsibility to champion regional concerns against the Amazon bias for concise experiences which often defy the expectations of international users.  

     Once the final design was approved, the task of development begins. Regional payment methods often defy the existing Amazon payment architecture and require redirection to external payment providers, unique behavior in order creation, and complex fix-up scenarios. This can span dozens of development and business teams with separate release schedules and takes an enormous amount of collaboration to achieve.

     Here is the Japan Mobile Carrier Billing payment method experience. In Japan it is common to make online purchases to your mobile phone carrier account and pay monthly along with your service cost. Each carrier has their own experience that needs to be supported.

     The major new element in JP MCB was that a redirection to the carrier is required at the time of purchase to complete the workflow and the charge is up front. Normally a payment method is created initially, then an order is created using that method which either succeeds or fails based on the response of the bank or institution. The charge generally happens when the package is shipped to allow for complex warehouse behavior. For JP MCB, the payment method needed to exist in several states during the purchase experience pending carrier response and the order had to exist in several states pending other carrier responses, and the carrier response varied by carrier with vastly different windows of response. This spread the experience across the entire purchase workflow, the user’s wallet page, across all order pages, across email responses, and generated a variety of new error states and fixup experiences at every point along the workflow (with expected timeouts in response windows). To achieve this, APX had to coordinate dozens of teams in payments and non-payments areas each with dozens of complex systems and services with their own development teams, each under different leadership with different goals and timelines. Amazon has virtually no mechanism for organizing cross-vertical product creation like this.

     In the end, I had to use the experience design to coordinate all of this effort. I drew an enormous whiteboard state flow model and mapped each state along the workflow to specific needs in each area of affect. I would then bring in each development team individually and walk them through the flow and answer questions and explain the importance of their individual effort. Without the full complexity mapped out, individual teams would make modifications within their area which broke the experience for other teams. This type of broad communication and collaboration organization became a regular part of my role earning me the (humorous) title of “Cognitive PM”.

     Note, this is only one payment method in one region. Japan had several new payment methods and mobile carrier billing was essentially different from region to region. However for each new method we could abstract some basic rails and experience like the act of redirection to an external institution. This technology could be reused for experiences like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

     In my time on the team, Amazon rapidly expanded to several new regions each year. For my first five years I was the only designer for the team. In my last two years, 6 additional designers were hired to take on some of this workload while I transitioned to a broader role owning the Payment Experience Bar Raiser process, being the pattern Czar, and shaping new feature vision across the business. But I still oversaw all new payment method creation.