Reviving An Abandoned App – Gavin Low – Medium
Reviving An Abandoned App
Redesigning AXS User Experience
@AXS is an avenue for consumers to pay their respective service providers in one stop.
Singapore is a “Fine” city, we get fine for almost everything. Living in a fast-paced environment, juggling our hectic schedules paying our bills can be quite an inconvenient chore. At times when we are not prudent enough, we might forget to pay our bills or fines which will result in a “bigger” fine.
In 2000, AXS redefine bill payment methods in singapore with 900 AXS Stations island-wide and 150 service providers (currently still updating). In 2012, AXS officially launched AXS m-Station mobile app available on both iOS and Android platforms.
But why do people still prefer to make their payments through the kiosk instead of leveraging on the convenience of the mobile app?
Contextual & Guerrilla Interviews & User Testing
However, AXS station is not the kiosk that offers bill payment service, their other competitor, S.A.M machine by Singpost recently was gaining a bit of presence with their machine and user interface redesign.
We begin our investigation on ground, we camped at a couple of AXS machines and interview some users. Our mission was to find out if the current AXS Kiosk users, also use the app or if they have any other prefer modes of payment and why.
Learnings: We found it easier to “bread crumbs” our questions and “lure” the interviewers into performing task and let them know we are documenting the process while they are performing the task.
We only scheduled 2 days for on-ground research, we manage to interview 10 people. To our surprise out of 8 out of 10 people we interviewed did not know about the AXS m-station. Only 1 out of 2 users uses both the kiosk and the app.
Our findings from the interviews
Apart from that understanding these user preferred mode of payments, we also conducted usability testing on the current AXS station users, we got them to re-perform the same task on the AXS m-Station and the S.A.M app. The intent was to see how long they take to perform the same task on both user interface.
Usability testing: We got some of the users to pay their phone bill on both platforms AXS (avg. 15 secs) vs S.A.M (avg. 6 secs). To be fair we started both app on payment page before they begin.
Competitor Analysis + Heuristic Evaluation
Competitor Analysis + Heuristic Evaluation (Jakob Nielsen)
Overview of other competitor analysis
Synthesising Research and Findings
We begin synthesising some of our findings through affinity mapping and the patterns user’s behaviour helped us generate a series of “I” statements. Giving us a clearer direction on which are the more immediate issues we should look into within the time frame of this project.
Pain/Pleasure points + Context & Behavior
Once we have gathered the pain, pleasure, context and behaviour of our users and drawing inspirations from interviewees, 3 personas were born. For this project we will be placing our focusing on Hayden.
Meet Amanda & Constance
Say hello to Hayden
Hayden’s consumer journey
Features prioritisation matrix
The features prioritisation matrix helps us strike a balance between needs of the user and stake holders and also outline the focus of features we need to look into redesigning,
Function to customised options of preferred payment methods
Reminders/notifications for payment due dates
Barcode scanning to auto-generate billing details
An avenue to keep track of current bills and past transactions
New Information Architect
Looking into the current sitemap structure of AXS m-Station, we identified potential issues that might be confusing the users thus creating an unpleasant user experience.
Organising categories with repeated task oriented information
Ambiguous labelling of categories
Lack of hierarchy in information
Based on original sitemap and the pain points of the users we attempt to resolve the problem by creating a new information architecture for the app;
Simplifying the categorises into 2 “My Bills” and “Find billing organisations”. (Existing user and New or one time user)
Recategorize the organisations and arranging them in alphabetical order
Opening new categories like education, clubs & societies, private housing, telco & utilities.
Incorporated pay by mastercard/master pass to payment methods
Mistake: If time permits, we should have done a closed or hybrid card sort to have a better gauge on how we categorised the organisations and CTAs. Due to the tight timeline, we categorised it based it on our assumptions.
Wireframe + Prototype
Finally we got down to brainstorming on the user interface design. After rounds of sketches, healthy debates, user testing, iterations and not forgetting coffees. We redesign this app the best we could within the limited time presented to us.
Learnings: It is always good to plan our wireframes on sketches, it gives us an overview of the pages, so we know if we need to add or remove pages .
Also if time permitted, we would have preferred to get our interviewees to test our prototype, but nevertheless we are thankful for helpful peeps in GA.
Our humble Hi-Fi Prototype
User Flow for “Find billing Organisations” + Barcode scanning feature mock-up
We reimagined that bill payments methods with AXS to be even more simplified and personalised in the near future, but of cos much research is still needed for the technology and security features.
There were also thoughts on incorporating GIRO deduction function to “My bills” section to allow user to be able to pay certain that timed on fix date with fixed amounts.
Other possibilities in the near future
Thank you to Team AGX, it was definitely a great pleasure working with with you ladies on this project, especially fun during the guerrilla interview. I have learnt much from you both and I look forward future collaborations.
(Xian.L and Angela Setho Thanks hor!)
An Abandon App
Embracing change with curiousity
Never miss a story from Gavin Low, when you sign up for Medium. Learn more
Never miss a story from Gavin Low
Reviving An Abandoned App – Gavin Low – Medium
Reviving An Abandoned App
Redesigning AXS User Experience
@AXS is an avenue for consumers to pay their respective service providers in one stop.
Singapore is a “Fine” city, we get fine for almost everything. Living in a fast-paced environment, juggling our hectic schedules paying our bills can be quite an inconvenient chore. At times when we are not prudent enough, we might forget to pay our bills or fines which will result in a “bigger” fine.
In 2000, AXS redefine bill payment methods in singapore with 900 AXS Stations island-wide and 150 service providers (currently still updating). In 2012, AXS officially launched AXS m-Station mobile app available on both iOS and Android platforms.
But why do people still prefer to make their payments through the kiosk instead of leveraging on the convenience of the mobile app?
Contextual & Guerrilla Interviews & User Testing
However, AXS station is not the kiosk that offers bill payment service, their other competitor, S.A.M machine by Singpost recently was gaining a bit of presence with their machine and user interface redesign.
We begin our investigation on ground, we camped at a couple of AXS machines and interview some users. Our mission was to find out if the current AXS Kiosk users, also use the app or if they have any other prefer modes of payment and why.
Learnings: We found it easier to “bread crumbs” our questions and “lure” the interviewers into performing task and let them know we are documenting the process while they are performing the task.
We only scheduled 2 days for on-ground research, we manage to interview 10 people. To our surprise out of 8 out of 10 people we interviewed did not know about the AXS m-station. Only 1 out of 2 users uses both the kiosk and the app.
Our findings from the interviews
Apart from that understanding these user preferred mode of payments, we also conducted usability testing on the current AXS station users, we got them to re-perform the same task on the AXS m-Station and the S.A.M app. The intent was to see how long they take to perform the same task on both user interface.
Usability testing: We got some of the users to pay their phone bill on both platforms AXS (avg. 15 secs) vs S.A.M (avg. 6 secs). To be fair we started both app on payment page before they begin.
Competitor Analysis + Heuristic Evaluation
Competitor Analysis + Heuristic Evaluation (Jakob Nielsen)
Overview of other competitor analysis
Synthesising Research and Findings
We begin synthesising some of our findings through affinity mapping and the patterns user’s behaviour helped us generate a series of “I” statements. Giving us a clearer direction on which are the more immediate issues we should look into within the time frame of this project.
Pain/Pleasure points + Context & Behavior
Once we have gathered the pain, pleasure, context and behaviour of our users and drawing inspirations from interviewees, 3 personas were born. For this project we will be placing our focusing on Hayden.
Meet 
Amanda & Constance
Say hello to Hayden
Hayden’s consumer journey
Features prioritisation matrix
The features prioritisation matrix helps us strike a balance between needs of the user and stake holders and also outline the focus of features we need to look into redesigning,
Function to customised options of preferred payment methods
Reminders/notifications for payment due dates
Barcode scanning to auto-generate billing details
An avenue to keep track of current bills and past transactions
New Information Architect
Looking into the current sitemap structure of AXS m-Station, we identified potential issues that might be confusing the users thus creating an unpleasant user experience.
Organising categories with repeated task oriented information
Ambiguous labelling of categories
Lack of hierarchy in information
Based on original sitemap and the pain points of the users we attempt to resolve the problem by creating a new information architecture for the app;
Simplifying the categorises into 2 “My Bills” and “Find billing organisations”. (Existing user and New or one time user)
Recategorize the organisations and arranging them in alphabetical order
Opening new categories like education, clubs & societies, private housing, telco & utilities.
Incorporated pay by mastercard/master pass to payment methods
Mistake: If time permits, we should have done a closed or hybrid card sort to have a better gauge on how we categorised the organisations and CTAs. Due to the tight timeline, we categorised it based it on our assumptions.
Wireframe + Prototype
Finally we got down to brainstorming on the user interface design. After rounds of sketches, healthy debates, user testing, iterations and not forgetting coffees. We redesign this app the best we could within the limited time presented to us.
Learnings: It is always good to plan our wireframes on sketches, it gives us an overview of the pages, so we know if we need to add or remove pages .
Also if time permitted, we would have preferred to get our interviewees to test our prototype, but nevertheless we are thankful for helpful peeps in GA.
Our humble Hi-Fi Prototype
User Flow for “Find billing Organisations” + Barcode scanning feature mock-up
We reimagined that bill payments methods with AXS to be even more simplified and personalised in the near future, but of cos much research is still needed for the technology and security features.
There were also thoughts on incorporating GIRO deduction function to “My bills” section to allow user to be able to pay certain that timed on fix date with fixed amounts.
Other possibilities in the near future
Thank you to Team AGX, it was definitely a great pleasure working with with you ladies on this project, especially fun during the guerrilla interview. I have learnt much from you both and I look forward future collaborations.
(Xian.L and Angela Setho Thanks hor!)
An Abandon App
Embracing change with curiousity
Never miss a story from Gavin Low, when you sign up for Medium. Learn more
Never miss a story from Gavin Low