Bringing back the one-step bill-pay shortcut clients lost, right where they bank.
The institution serves high-net-worth individuals who may hold anywhere from a handful to several hundred payees. My brief was deceptively small: create a quick, useful way to pay a bill straight from the homepage.
As the lead designer, I owned the work end to end, from framing the problem and running the research to delivering the high-fidelity designs for development. Along the way I used the evidence I gathered to make a larger argument: that the entire desktop payments experience deserved a revamp.
What started as a single homepage card became the business case for elevating desktop payments altogether.
How might we let clients pay their bills seamlessly and efficiently?
How might we help clients navigate through hundreds of bills and payees?
How might a quick-payment feature grow and retain online banking clients?
Quick bill pay used to exist, until a platform migration quietly took it away. Five frustrations defined the state we inherited.
A shortcut that vanished. Quick bill pay lived in the legacy app. When that app was decommissioned, the feature was never carried into the new experience.
Two products, one task. Desktop ran on a third-party service in an iframe; mobile was a custom build on the same APIs. The inconsistency confused and upset clients.
Payees without end. A list of potentially hundreds of payees, with no way to search or filter through it.
Accounts without end. Likewise, hundreds of accounts to pay from, and no easy way to move through them.
Buried action. To send a payment at all, clients had to scroll to the very bottom of the page to find the ‘Send Money’ button.
To set a baseline, I ran a competitive analysis of five banking and payments products. I built comparison matrices to structure what I found, then packaged the takeaways and recommendations into a presentation for the wider product team.
The analysis did two jobs. It directly informed the design decisions ahead, and it gave me the evidence to argue for something bigger: bringing the desktop experience in-house, replacing the third-party iframe with a custom build consistent with mobile and aligned to current industry standards.
One feature's research became the case for a full desktop payments redesign.
With the user feedback and competitive insights in hand, I moved into exploration, iterating quickly across structure and UI before committing to anything for testing. Two directions led the way.
Because this feature would live on the homepage, we invested in moderated usability testing. Working with a researcher, I prepared the wireframes and we put them in front of clients — watching whether they could complete a payment, and where they hesitated.
5 of 5 participants needed a hint to find the Bill Pay card. Every one of them asked for fewer steps and fewer clicks.
The signal was unambiguous. Discoverability and speed weren't polish items; they were the whole job. The clients' own words made the priorities impossible to ignore.
It was just up at my right-hand corner before. Why is it at the bottom there? I'd rather see it more prominent somewhere.
On the old system I didn't have to go into a payment. I'd just click, fill in the payee, the amount, the date, and I'm done. It was a shortcut, and I missed that.
I could go down to Bill Pay, but that doesn't really give me easy access to pay a bill really quickly.
Four decisions came directly out of Round 01. Each one maps to something a client said or struggled with.
All five participants needed a hint to find the card.
Promoted the Bill Pay card high on the homepage to make it the first thing clients see.
Everyone wanted fewer steps and fewer clicks.
Replaced the modal flow with a single card driven by dropdowns, so clients pay without leaving the page.
Hundreds of payees were impossible to navigate.
Separated Bills and Payees into two clear sections so clients could find the right one fast.
Clients needed reassurance the payment went through.
Designed a success screen that surfaces the confirmation number front and center.
This time, clients were satisfied to very satisfied. One friction remained: they wanted to trust their bills would be paid on time.
So I sharpened the problem statement to name that need explicitly, then designed a more robust date-selection experience around it.
Clients need a frictionless way to pay, easy navigation through dozens of bills and payees, and confidence their bills are paid on time.
The Pay Date field opens a calendar picker, defaulted to the earliest date a payment can be made.
The calendar marks the bill's due date in context, so clients can plan around it.
Dates that aren't available — weekends and holidays — are clearly disabled.
Once chosen, the date is confirmed in the field with the earliest and due dates spelled out.
06 — Results
I shipped a quick bill-payment design that let clients pay quickly and confidently, straight from the page they open first.