Bills table showing a bill with partial payments. We preserved the full bill amount (since that is how users identified the bill), and we indicated the partial payment and remaining amounts in rows below.
“Pay bill” form
Bill view state showing payments and credits
My role
UX Lead, working with one product manager, two developers, and two QA team members.
Activities
- Handoff from another designer who began the project
- Scenario development
- Integration with existing business logic
- Wireframing
- Moderated, remote usability testing
- Detailed screen design
- Refinement with developers and QA
- Prioritizing phases with product owners
About Buildium
Buildium is a web and mobile application for property management. Over 10,000 customers depend on the software as the backbone of their business.
The problem / opportunity
Buildium lacked a feature to partially pay a bill. Customer care had guided customers to a workaround that was clumsy and consumed more customer care resources than necessary.
The solution
We allowed users to make a partial payment on a bill, while keeping the initial simplicity of the workflow. I created new screens and updated existing screens to handle this new scenario. I specified business logic that arose from the new capability and refined it, simplifying it in collaboration with our developers. We also designed a workflow for an alternate scenario and reprioritized this with product managers – to just launch the primary workflow first and later assess the alternate one.
Fitting the user’s mental model
When a bill had been partially paid, we tried a couple of approaches on how to display the amount of the bill on the bills table – the bill in question could show either the remaining amount or the full (initial) bill amount. We found in our testing that the full amount was one of the most common ways that a user identified a bill, so we decided that the full amount should be preserved as it always was, and below that, we indicated the partial payment and remaining amounts as secondary information.