Easy Payment is a mobile payment solution developed by the Central Bank of Iran, designed to facilitate seamless money transactions for millions of users.
EASY PAYMENT
Mobile Design
Key Goal:
The key goal of this project was to design a clear and intuitive visualization of transaction histories. By enabling users to easily search through transactions and identify key spending patterns, the design supports more effective budgeting and financial decision-making.
CLIENT
Central Bank of Iran
ROLE
UX Researcher
UX/UI Designer
LOCATION
Tehran
Easy Payment is a leading mobile payment platform initially focused on innovative invoicing solutions and cashless transactions, it has since expanded to offer a secure digital wallet, ePayment, and eBank services. This application provides seamless, user-friendly solutions for over 10 million Iranians, simplifying everyday electronic payments—from purchasing flight and cinema tickets to grocery shopping and paying taxi fares. This is the story of how I enhanced the user experience for Easy Payment, enabling users to easily track their past transactions.
OVERVIEW
As a design lead, I was responsible for enhancing the experience strategy and design of the 'transaction' features, enabling users to easily access and track their past transactions. I led the UX team, conducted comprehensive research, and developed the content strategy. I collaborated closely with two junior UX designers, guiding their efforts on information architecture and persona development.
MY ROLE
With Iran’s government push towards adopting cashless payments, the development of internet banking technology and adoption of digital payment methods became prevalent. Easy Payment aims to facilitate the most common Iranian internal transactions in one unique platform. This application has more than 10 million users and about 20% of all electronic payments are done through this platform. This app shares an aim to be helpful even for old-school users. By having a digital wallet, the users of AP can transfer all their payments easily and fast just by one click. Therefore, by increasing the number of feed transactions for each user the system needs to organize and categorize the feeds in order to be more transparent and reliable.
ORGANISING THE PERSONAL TRANSACTION FEEDS
Improve the app’s usability and functionality for tracking users' financial allocations.
At the start of the project, users could only download their past transactions as a CSV file on the desktop platform, with no such option available on mobile. Additionally, the lack of an efficient search feature forced users to endlessly scroll through past transactions, leading to frustration and a poor user experience.
CHALLENGES
We prioritized user needs by exploring various scenarios to improve functionality. This approach helped us uncover the real pain points users face when accessing payment statements and tracking past transactions. Our design strategy began with a focus on completing essential tasks, ensuring that the product was intuitive and efficient. From there, we aimed to create a meaningful experience that sets us apart in a competitive market. To achieve this, we established a foundation for delivering a reliable, high-performing, and easy-to-learn user experience.
THE APPROACH: FOCUSING ON USER-CENTERED DESIGN
Stephen Anderson’s UX Hierarchy of Needs heavily influenced our product strategy
In this project, we adopted a Lean UX approach to create a dynamic knowledge board. Lean UX enabled us to gather rapid feedback for making swift decisions and iterative improvements. This approach ensured that no valuable data was overlooked and that all positive changes were efficiently implemented.
TRACKING RESEARCH AND DESIGN SOLUTIONS WITH LEAN UX
We chose Figma for its ability to streamline collaboration. Its features, including in-app commenting in both design and prototype modes, allowed for real-time feedback. Team members’ comments were tracked via email, ensuring everyone stayed aligned. This flexibility helped us move quickly, creating a robust cross-platform solution suitable for Agile development.
BUILDING PROTOTYPES IN FIGMA FOR SEAMLESS COLLABORATION
By investing time with stakeholders during the planning phase, we fostered a shared understanding and vision. This collaboration revealed new opportunities and clarified the team’s business challenges. Together, we identified key issues, limitations, and opportunities, aligning expectations and forming a unified vision for the app. We then conducted a gap analysis and quantitative audits to propose essential content adjustments.
ALIGNING ON A SHARED VISION
From the very beginning, we prioritized transparency by sharing our methods and design thinking process. This approach fostered a trusting and collaborative environment between us and the client. We explored new opportunities and bridged our perspectives to align on the project’s direction and objectives. As a UX leader, I believe that investing time upfront to learn from clients helps anticipate challenges and minimizes wasted efforts later on.
BUILDING TRUST THROUGH TRANSPARENCY
During the Agile discovery phase, we began by reviewing existing work and investigating user behaviors, attitudes, and motivations. We then made assumptions about user expectations from transaction feeds. To validate these assumptions, we conducted research that included informal interviews and aligned our findings with the client’s vision.
As part of the discovery, we created five personas to simplify the design task and guide the ideation process. These personas were essential in shaping a meaningful user experience for AP users. Our research revealed differences between our assumptions and users' actual needs. We discovered that user expectations varied based on their occupation and how frequently they used the app.
After defining the persona types and aligning them with our design strategy, we identified the key users to focus on for the next stage of development. We categorized the personas into three groups: primary, secondary, and negative personas. In the first phase of the project, we concentrated on supporting the goals of Farhad and Hamed, our primary personas, who used the platform frequently for most of their transactions. The second phase was designed to address the needs of Farzane and Mina, occasional users who appreciated the app’s ability to simplify transactions and eliminate the need to visit ATMs or banks.
WHAT SHOULD A “TRANSACTION STATEMENT” DO FOR USERS?
THE DISCOVERY
“We created personas to simplify the design process and guide ideation to achieve a seamless user experience for AP users.”
Our persona hypothesis consisted of five distinct archetypes, which helped us gather data and uncover trends and patterns in user behavior. This sparked discussions about user needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. Through this research, we gained valuable insights into how user expectations shift based on how often they use the app and their comfort level with digital banking. We shared these personas with the client to ensure a shared understanding of who the design would target in the first phase, with future releases addressing additional personas.
The client provided us with quantitative data, which helped us understand how many users downloaded their monthly transaction feeds from the website and how often. However, this data alone couldn't reveal what users truly needed or why. To address this gap, I conducted interviews with a few users, asking open-ended questions to gain deeper insights into their motivations for using the mobile payment platform and identifying their main pain points. I also performed benchmarking research to better understand the industry landscape.
Through these research methods, I gained valuable insights into users' needs, motivations, and workflows, leading to a clearer picture of the challenges they faced.
Key User Needs:
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Transparency: Users need to regularly check their payment history.
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Organization: Users need to categorize and organize their spending.
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Clarity: Users need to clearly identify the purpose of each transaction.
EMPATHIZING WITH USERS
Based on the insights gathered, I hypothesized that adding a transaction statement feature to the AP mobile app would enhance its reliability and trustworthiness by giving users easy access to past transactions.
FORMULATING A HYPOTHESIS
From the discovery phase, I realized the design of a transaction statement feature should do more than just display past transactions. It should offer users insights into their monthly spending habits, helping them manage their finances according to their budget.
DESIGNING BEYOND USABILITY
To guide the design process, I applied Usability Heuristics—a set of Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) principles. These principles ensured the creation of intuitive and effective user interfaces.
With this in mind, I generated a list of features for improvement based on the research. To prioritize effectively, I used the MoSCoW Method, which breaks down deliverables as follows:
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Must: Critical features for timely delivery
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Should: Important but not essential features
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Could: Desirable but non-essential features
Usability Heuristics is a set of Human Factors and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) principles that guided us to intuitive and effective user interfaces.
To align strategy and content with overall business objectives, I focused on solutions that deliver tangible value. Bridging the gap between user needs and business goals required a clear vision of the shared values that link the two. This led the UX team to define core principles that reflect the personality and key attributes of the AP app while meeting user expectations for tone and experience.
PROVIDING VALUE AND MEANINGFUL OUTCOMES
THE REQUIREMENTS
Be Accessible and Intuitive
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Cater to users of all ages, education levels, and technical abilities.
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Align with the user’s mental model for ease of use.
Be Simple
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Embrace a "less is more" philosophy.
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Eliminate unnecessary features to focus on what matters.
Be Productive
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Facilitate fast and seamless communication.
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Design adaptable user flows that fit naturally into users' lives.
Be Useful and Beautiful
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Blend aesthetics and functionality for an efficient, pleasing experience.
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Appeal to both the rational and emotional needs of users.
Be Reliable
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Provide instant, transparent information about financial transactions.
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Foster trust through clarity and transparency.
Be Organized
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Enable users to effectively sort and manage their data.
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Maintain balance between income and expenses for better financial clarity.
During the design phase, I began by brainstorming ideas on how to structure UI elements, organize content, and define the information architecture. This included mapping out activity flows and conceptualizing the layout. I started with low-fidelity sketches to assess the foundational design of a shared information environment.
DESIGNING USER INTERFACE & EXPERIENCE
THE FRAMEWORK
At this stage, we conducted a meeting with the client to discuss the discovery findings and align on key elements, such as the content and functionality of the transaction history. Based on this discussion, I developed a detailed user flow to represent the overall architecture of the app.
ON TRACK AND IN SYNC
Before diving into detailed design, I built a user flow map to outline content organization and streamline the user experience. This visualization allowed the team to grasp the structure, connections, and complexities of the system immediately. The user flow also revealed multi-step interactions, identified potential gaps, and simplified the design process by highlighting opportunities for improvement.
FLOWS VISUALIZATION
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In the final stage of our project, we created a high-fidelity prototype using Figma, a leading tool for collaborative design. Figma’s features allowed team members to provide real-time feedback on each other's work, facilitating seamless progress and collaboration. This iterative process enabled us to fully integrate our user-centered approach into the product.
The completed prototype was presented to the client and our development partner, marking the culmination of our design efforts.
Below, you will find a gallery showcasing each page we developed for the launch.
THE INTERACTION FRAMEWORK
We conducted user testing on a live version of the application, which allowed us to address key usability issues. These included improving the readability and legibility of the typography, ensuring high-contrast color selection, optimizing the layout with appropriate spacing, and measuring the Task Success Rate—tracking the percentage of successfully completed tasks by users.
One critical issue we identified was related to the search functionality. Users searched for transactions using varied keywords, such as card number, name, date, and categories. This insight helped us reprioritize development tasks and enhance the search feature. Additionally, it informed the client’s decision to focus on more personalized features in future development phases.
USABILITY TESTING
This project served as a valuable enhancement to the main AP application, designed to help over 10 million users track their spending. The client recognized that this UX initiative not only improved the application's usability but also aligned with users' financial management goals. Feedback from the Net Promoter Score (NPS) indicated a positive impact on user satisfaction and their likelihood to recommend the app to others.
Beyond usability improvements, the project introduced essential values such as accountability, integrity, reliability, and transparency, providing a more human-centered experience for users.