Pay repeat bills in one click

Timeline

4 weeks

Team

Senior User Researcher, Product Owner, Senior Product Designer

Skills

User Research, Product Design

Timeline

4 weeks

Team

Senior User Researcher, Product Owner, Senior Product Designer

Skills

User Research, Product Design

Overview

RBC Edge is where commercial clients pay their bills.

It’s replacing the old platform and bill payment was one of the first flows to rebuild. I designed saved payee groups so a repeat payment takes one click.

My role

I joined as a research intern to find out what to fix first. Then I took the findings further and designed concept for payee management & payment creation.

Interviews

Journey map

Competitive scan

Prototyping

Problem

Too many steps to make a bill payment

To pay many suppliers on RBC’s old platform, businesses exported their list to Excel, added amounts, and uploaded it back. Every month, the same list.

Solution

A saved group fills the payment table in one click

Clients save the payees they pay together as a group. Next month they press Pay Group, the table fills with those payees, and they only type the amounts. No more Excel.

Research

Two problems came up again and again

Journey mapping, interviews and client comments from the old platform all pointed to the same two problems: too many steps to make a payment, and re-entering payee details every month.

ExpressOld platform · 7 steps

Outside the system

EdgeToday · 3 steps

The gapThese two sections don’t connect, so paying the same payees every month means picking them again.

So the question became:

How can someone pay payees they've already saved without rebuilding the list every month?

Exploration

I explored three ways to fill the payment table faster

A table to pay many payees at once was already planned but filling it was still manual. I explored three ways to get payees into it.

Filter

Filter the payee list

Clients sort payees into filters, like Utilities or Rent, then select a whole filter to pay it at once.

Upload

Upload and save a file

I moved file upload to the start of Make payments and added the option to save the file so the same payees can be reused every month.

Suggestions

Suggest payees

The system notices which payees a client usually pays together each month and adds them to the table.

Decisions

Key design decisions

Decision 1: Saved groups, not suggested payees

Suggestions guess which payees a client wants to pay. A saved group is a list the client builds themselves, so the payment table always matches what they chose.

The saved group Head Office Utilities. Four payees are listed: Bell Canada, City of Toronto Water, Enbridge Gas and Hydro One Networks, with a Pay Group button above the table.

Decision 2: Groups tab, not a filter.

A filter could also save a selection, but it lives inside the long payee list. A separate Groups tab gives saved groups their own place so they’re faster to find and easier to keep organized.

Manage Bill Payees with the Filters list open, showing filters such as Utilities, Rent and Q3 Vendors.

Manage Bill Payees with Groups and Payees tabs. The Groups tab is open and lists one saved group, Head Office Utilities.

Decision 3: Pick payees in a panel on the same page

Uploading a file means building the list outside the platform. An action panel opens on the same page, so clients choose from the payee list they already know.

Manage Bill Payees on the Payees tab. Three payees are selected, Bell Canada, City of Toronto Water and Enbridge Gas, with a Create Group from Selected Payees button above the table. Callout 1 says Select payees and callout 2 says Create group.

Solution

A saved group that fills the payment table

Here is the 3 parts solution I designed for bill payment.

01 / Groups tab to manage payee groups

02 / Create a group from selected payees

03 / Pay Group fills the payment table

Reflection

What I learned

Build on what’s already there

I suggested a feature that extended what we were already building. Keeping it small in time and effort made it easy to say yes to and it solved a real user problem.

Don’t be afraid to pivot

Research showed me a chance to improve the design so I asked to design it and bring suggestions.