FlexPay

On-demand pay checks – Creating a new business for SAP's product suite

Company

SAP

Year

2019

Project Type

Zero-to-one

Scope of Work

Research, UX, UI

Platform

Responsive Web

FlexPay originated within SAP's product incubator and accelerator when we identified a new HR and Payroll trend – on-demand pay checks – as a net new market and right-to-win for SAP.

Over the course of 3 months, my co-founder and I conducted market research, competitive analysis, ran smoke tests, and build a small MVP as a proof of concept. We delivered our insights and results to an internal investment committee and received funding to continue developing the product.

In February 2019, I began leading the team’s Design and Marketing efforts, taking the product from a fairly conceptual MVP to an Alpha Release. I’ve been responsible for defining the product and brand vision and executing against our roadmap, working in close collaboration with our Product Owner and Development team.

Context

FlexPay is an on-demand pay solution, empowering employees to get early access to their earned but unpaid income while helping businesses reduce their turnover and recruitment challenges. Millions of people in the US struggle to make ends meet and get stuck in the vicious cycle of paying overdraft fees or resorting to payday loans. This creates low motivation and frustration amongst the workforce, resulting in low performance and high turnover for employers. With FlexPay, employees can reach financial stability and peace of mind, while employers experience significant cost savings.

Scope

In this case study, I will be focusing on the research, UX, and UI efforts for FlexPay. Overall, I was in charge of all design and marketing related topics and created multiple assets such as our website, branding, design system, illustrations, one-pagers, presentations, social media assets, emails, and event signage.

Smoke Tests

One of the first things we decided to do pre-investment was to run smoke tests to validate interest from our target audience. As with most smoke test, I started with a hypothesis:

If we can maintain a CTR of at least 5% in 4 weeks of running ads, I expect it’s worth building the product.

In order to understand if end users would find value in a solution like FlexPay, I created a few Google Ads to generate traffic to our landing page where our three core features were highlighted along with a sign-up form with which I measured “interested users” in the form of unique sign-ups. Our ads performed well with CTRs of over 7%, and over 15% of those people signed up for early access on our website. Based on this data, we exceeded our hypothesis and we were confident that there is enough interest in the market to move forward and pitch to our investment committee.

Pitch & Funding

We prepared a presentation focusing around our research findings and smoke test results.

The investment committee decided to invest in us and the product and we received seed stage funding to build out the product.

Personas

To kick things off, I wanted to make sure I fully understand who our users are. I had a good enough understanding of our user profile in terms of targeting the right people with our ads, but for the next steps I needed to narrow down our personas. Based on some of our earlier market research and competitive analysis, I created two different user personas:

Persona A – The Single Mom

Persona B – The Gen-Z Worker

Research

Thanks to our smoke tests we knew that people are interested in FlexPay, but in order to get started and understand what exactly users are looking for in our solution, I ran an exploratory quantitative study with the target audience I had previously mapped out in the form of personas. I recruited participants that matched our user profile via Linkedin and Facebook and reached out directly via private message and shared the link to the study. After explaining what the study is about and how the product would work, my main approach was to give the users a list of key features and asked them rank the features from most important to least important.

I collected a total of 23 responses and calculated the average rating of each feature. Of the 10 features suggested, 3 features outperformed the others with ratings over 4. The most important features for my test group were the amount of money available to withdraw, how much they have earned to date, and a way to transfer the funds to their bank account.

User Stories

With the previously gathered research, we were able to build out user stories to both keep the user in the center of the conversation and also set the stage for the development team and their efforts. In addition, this was the starting point of the next step in my design process.

Ideation

The next step in my process was to translate the user stories into a rough user flow by sketching out some first ideas on a whiteboard, focusing on the three core features I identified with my research study. After presenting my concepts to our Product Owner, we decided that some features wouldn't be feasible for now and to add those to our roadmap for a future release (see priority ranking in user stories). I continued my process by turning the rough sketches into wireframes.

I continued my process by turning the rough sketches into wireframes. I used these mid-fi screens to get some early UX feedback through a quick study with colleagues in the office. They were not the target audience for this app, but help provide guidance for general usability issues.

User Testing

After gathering a few insights from the usability study, I applied our brand principles and preliminary design system to my design and turned the wireframes into a high-fidelity, click-through prototype for more user testing.

After testing the refined prototype with users, I noticed people squinting at the screen. They had a hard time reading some of the content. I skilled up on accessibility topics and turned to testing tools and Figma plugins to execute testings. I realized that this color scheme fails all accessibility tests. On top of that, drop shadows were hardly visible on some devices and some of the copy was too small to be legible – a great learning and opportunity to improve the experience for users.

Next steps

We’ve continuously conducted user testing and feedback sessions to improve our product and create the best possible experience for employees and employers. Some of the feedback we received and added to our roadmap was developing a native app for our users and an Admin Dashboard for employers.

Ideation & exploration – Native app

Ideation – Dashboard and Payout screens

Discovery – Admin dashboard

Designs – Admin dashboard

Product sunset

Unfortunately, these new features, concepts, and aspirations didn’t make it past the roadmap.

After 18 months in pursuit of helping employees achieve greater financial well-being by offering free, on-demand pay as an alternative to payday loans and other costly products, we have decided together with our Advisory Board to wind down FlexPay. Given the market dynamics and high degree of legal uncertainty, there were significant headwinds for FlexPay.

Learnings

I am incredibly thankful for this experience and learned more than I could have ever imagined in such a short amount of time. I learned what it’s like to take on an immense amount of responsibility and make important product decisions. I had great exposure to customers and account teams and got valuable insights into the sales cycle. I gained a better understanding for business topics that were out of my comfort zone such as Marketing, Customer Acquisition, Go-To-Market, and Lead Gen. I was awarded the opportunity to pitch FlexPay to SAP’s CEO at the time, Bill McDermott. I embraced my female founder role and got to share my learnings, mistakes, and experience in building a startup.