AP SUPER-APP
AsanPardakht(AP) is a Payment Service Provider(PSP) which is the leader of mobile payment in Iran and the 23rd PSP company in the world. AP mobile application with more than 40 million users is the biggest supper-app in Iran. For about 3 and a half years, I was the head of the product design team in close collaboration with Product owners, Marketing and of course the Development team.
Although, AP didn't have a product design department before I joined.
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Let me walk you through some of my challenging design projects I managed at AP, as case studies
PRODUCT BACKLOG AND PRIORITIZATION
Design deadline: 1 month
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Challenges
+20 different services with totally different business models
+350 tasks (small and big) to prioritize
The first time to create a product back log in the company
Selecting a good model for prioritizing
Evaluating the task in the selected prioritization model (ICE model)
Creating the road map after final prioritization
Reviewing after every road map delivered
Main Results
Gathering all user feed backs from the call center and the social media and divided them by service
Interviewing product managers to gather their business needs
Solving the traditional fight between the marketing and product team and the development team
Creating a clear picture of what we really should do
Since there was over 350 task to prioritize, the standard models like ICE(Impact-Confidence-Ease) didn't work well so we add 3 extra KPIs to select tasks more precisely
PAY WITH QR-SCAN
Design deadline: 2 month
State: launched
Challenges
Short deadline
Both user and merchants were our target audience for this service
This payment method was completely new to both users and merchants
This service was supposed to replace POS devices to lower company heavy investment on POS device and raise company profit as the result.
This service was also supposed to solve "Money change" problem for taxi passengers and drivers.
This service was also supposed to supposed to use online wallet to promote "One-Click" payment
Main Results
Reaching up to 30,000 daily transactions in 6 months
Over 40,000 Taxis started to use our service
After Launch we found out that drivers are used to get SMS to be sure that passenger payment is successfully done and getting an instant notification was not trustworthy to them.
To promote using this service with wallet credit we put the balance in the first view and when paying with wallet if the credit was not enough, we didn't fill out the needed amount in the recharge step in order to avoid "Zero amount" for wallet balance.
DOMESTIC FLIGHT TICKET BOOKING
Design deadline: 1 month
State: launched
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Challenges
Short deadline
Powerful competitor with good service and 24/7 support
Our users knew us for our super-simplicity in our main services such as Simcard Recharge. We had to be that simple for such a complicated service.
Since our partner's API was not stable, we had to have "My Tickets" page fully online. So if users had a connection problem, they could't access to My Tickets page.
It was the first time for both Design and development team to implement Flight booking service
We already had our partner's web view service which had a bad UX, but was launched because of business reasons and we had to recover that bad experience too.
Main Results
5 times better conversion than having our partner's web view.
Reaching to 30 percent of the market leader by selling 4000 tickets per day out of around 100,000 searches per day(of course by the help of good marketing)
Although the launched version was a MVP, we didn't have UX claims from our call center or in the social media.
As a result of out survey, 30 percent of our users hadn't buy any tickets online and this showed that keeping it simple powerfully works.
MONEY TRANSFER (CARD TO CARD)
Challenges
Being the first company to provide this service
After about 20 years of using ATMs for money transfer we were about to bring that experience to the online world for the first time
We hat to stick to users mental model about "Card to Card" money transfer
Competitors were trying to provide the service too and it was very important to be the first provider so we had to go fast.
As the number of supported banks went up we wanted to show their logo in a small slider but for some reasons development team couldn't implement that correctly and we end up with a long text in the UI!!
Main Results
The service was launched by supporting just 2 but popular banks at first. But it was good enough to hit the market ASAP
Although this service had no direct revenue, but the amount of desirability that it added to our app, caused a huge raise in installation that in about 1 year we reached to 30 million user app from 5 million users.
Since there was banks services in the back-end, we didn't have any control on errors and system crash which was affecting our user experience
FIX-INCOME INVESTMENT SERVICE
Challenges
1 week deadline!!
The first time in Iran
Partner's poor API with bad user flows which we couldn't change because of both business and security reasons
Since our goal was to engage low income users with zero knowledge about investing online, we had to be very very very simple and clear on everything.
We knew our target users have never heard of or used such service because we were going to be the first one in large scale.
We didn't have anytime to do some user research and run usability tests even with our colleagues because time to market was very very critical at that time
Main Results
Almost 10 million dollars was invested in about 6 months!!!!!
Surprisingly we didn't have much complaints about usability as we expected
Most of our improvements after launch were "Copy" related improvements learnt from users and call center feedback
Although we tried to keep is simple stupid, but the service had its own none-deferential complexity. But since it has a good desirability which was the most profit compared to everywhere else, both service complexity and our fast designed service were covered by that.
