Indeed: Payment Platform

Indeed’s Payments Team was looking for ways to improve the customer experience of their platform to influence planning for the next fiscal year. Historically, there were concerns that the payment-related information going out to customers seemed spammy and untrustworthy. I set about looking for areas of opportunity and changes the team could make to solve these issues.

Impact: This initiative informed key improvements, resulting in a 20% increase in consumer satisfaction.

Please note that I took full ownership of the end-to-end research process, with the guidance of a mentor.

The Basics

  • The Client

    Indeed Payments Team

  • Role

    Lead UX Researcher

    UX Research Mentor

  • The Team

    Tara Rastogi

    Kristiina Kinnunen

  • Skills

    Competitive Analysis

    Qualitative Research

    Test Documentation (Screeners, Moderated & Unmoderated Test Development)

    User Interviews / Usability Testing

    Interview Moderating & Notetaking

    Data Analysis / Synthesis

Project Overview

Client Requirements:

Indeed’s Payments Team is looking to improve the customer payment experience. Anecdotally, there have been concerns that the “update credit card information” email might be too spammy, causing customers to distrust that this email is coming from Indeed. Additionally, the Team would like to know if the information that they currently provide about credit card charges on customers’ credit card statements is sufficient or whether any changes should be made.

Research questions:

1. Do customers find the ‘update credit card information’ email suspicious or spammy? Why?

  • If so, are there any improvements we can make to the content of the email?

2. What do customers think about information from Indeed in their credit cardstatement?

  • Is there enough information about the transaction?

3. What do customers think about payment notifications for updates?

  • Would they prefer it in email form? Text? Push notifications?

Participant Recruitment

After meeting with the Payments Team to learn about their project requirements, I built out a participant screener and ran it on UserTesting.com.

The criteria that I screened participants for included:

  • All must must work for a company that has used Indeed’s paid services within last 12 months

  • All must work for a company which uses Indeed.com for paid job postings

  • All must have personally posted a job on Indeed.com and input their credit card information, using auto charge

  • All must personally review or pay bills for hiring services for their company

  • Mix of small and medium employers - small and medium business (SMB)

  • All must be directly involved with recruiting and hiring

  • We are looking for English-speaking employers in North America (US and Canada markets only)

View participant screener HERE.

While participants were being screened, I simultaneously built out guides for both the moderated interviews and unmoderated tests. The moderated interview guide had an interactive component, which I will expand upon in the next section, to further understand how participants viewed both the payment email and credit card statement.

Usability Testing

Participant Overview:

The breakdown of my interviews looked like this:

  • 12 total participants

    • 8 of whom completed unmoderated tests

    • 4 of whom were involved in moderated interviews

Through these 12 interviews and tests, I found several overlapping insights, as well as common behavioral trends and patterns.

Moderated Interviews:

As previously mentioned, the moderated interviews had an interactive component, in which participants were able to mark up the email and credit card statement shown to them. These notations indicated features they liked or disliked, and they talked me through their thoughts while going through both screens. In engaging with my participants in this way, I was able to see them think out loud in real time, and their notes made for highly effective artifacts.

Key Findings

During my data synthesis, some common themes emerged, which informed the following insights:

  1. Participants preferred the “update credit card” email to an in-app notification reminder, and many expressed how glad they were to receive such a clear, concise email.

  2. Participants trusted that the “update credit card” email was secure and was, in fact, coming from Indeed. A seven-point Likert Scale revealed that, on average, participants rated their comfort level clicking through this message as a 6.75/7.

  3. Some participants mentioned wanting to be reminded to update their credit card with both an email and an in-application notification. By using both methods, a greater sense of urgency would be conveyed, which is critical as missing this message would result in their Indeed services being shut off.

Recommendations

Based on my analysis and findings, I recommended the following ideas to the Product Management Team:

Next Steps

Further Questions to Consider:

Upon completing this study, I came up with additional questions that could be explored to take this research to the next level:

  1. How can we further legitimize Indeed’s payment-related emails so as not to raise customer concern?

  2. Would phone-based payment notifications be of interest to customers?

  3. Which means of color-coding most effectively communicates a sense of urgency for customers?

Final Report