China is pretty much a cashless society by now. In China, almost all stores accept cashless payments like WeChat Pay. Here's how WeChat QR code payment works:
Merchants generate their own individual payment collection QR code. Customers open WeChat to scan the code, confirm the amount, and make the payment after passing the security checks. This product is designed for merchants without code scanners or other cash registers that can be used to collect money.
Below is the user payment flow from the customer's end:
Objectives
The business objective is to encourage merchants to use WeChat as the main method to receive payment.
The research objective is to improve the user flow on the merchant's end, increase efficiency, and make it easier to use.
Methodologies
In order to gain better insights on how users interact with the product and their needs, I employed contextual inquiry as the main methodology. The participant observation allows the researcher to assess actual behavior in real time, and in-depth interviews allow participants to tell their stories, uninterrupted, in a detailed and coherent manner in an environment that they are comfortable in.
Before the study – Participants are briefed about the nature of the study.
During the study – The researcher acts as an observer, develops a list of questions that are then posed to the participant at a later stage.
Follow up - conduct an interview based on the user's experience, so the researcher can probe for more details.
Findings
One thing we noticed during the study was the user often make phone calls about their received payments. We already designed notification feature to inform users when they receive a new payment, so we weren't sure who they were calling or why they needed to do that.
After interviewing the users, we learned that it was because:
Each QR code is connected to one WeChat account, which is linked to one individual's bank accounts
The owner of the business isn’t always at the store so they will put the staff in charge
When the customer scans the QR code and pays, the store owner will get the notification instead of the staff
So they call or message each other to confirm the receipt of payment before the staff delivers the product to the customer
So this is what we thought was happening for each transaction:
And this is what is actually happening:
In response to this new finding, we designed a feature that allows our users to authenticate other users (staff) to receive the payment notification.
