It starts to get complicated pretty fast. Despite our beastly problem at hand, I was knew we could do it!

As I began to point out the huge gaps and confusing experience through sketches and other visuals while asking specific questions people started to understand how impactful this could be. Collectively we also were able to understand how truly complex this problem was, and it became very obvious why something like this hadn’t been attempted before. Here’s a reference of one of those sketches.

After these initial conversations and exploration I realized that I needed some way to track and visualize all the differences across markets and complex rules that we needed to communicate to users.

So I had some deep focus time. The image below is just a portion of the actual FigJam file, but I think it communicates enough of the complexity and large amount of details we were dealing with. 😅

Not only did this really help me to prepare for designing such a complex experience, but it quickly became very popular with everyone involved. People really liked how it quickly communicated the complexity and broke it down for both the user experience and the backend logic and dependencies. Even though it was a challenging to make I’m very proud of what it helped us accomplish together!

I like to use design and visual assets as a communication tool. To ask questions, call attention to gaps or assumptions, or to help other people do the same. I find it’s very effective at giving substance to a conversation that otherwise might feel elusive and challenging to grapple with. That’s what I continued to do with these high fidelity explorations with project leaders, devs, and the UX team.

As the conversations and design exploration continued to be refined, we decided on a few core pieces of this experience:

1. Help the user see at a glance whether they’re commission qualified or not
   • If not qualified, help them understand why and give them an action to take.
   • If qualified, are there any other relevant messaging or actions they might need or want to take?
2. Let the user quickly see at a glance their next commission amount and next pay date.
3. If their commission are on hold for any reason, change the pay date to a status that indicates that change

Here’s an early exploration of what that might look like:

We continued refining details and identifying specific messaging that might be helpful including a happy state and various states with differing emphasis and messaging.

I also started working with one of our amazing UX Researchers to get some really scrappy research done. We weren’t officially approved for UX Research on this project but we still wanted some insight from people with domain knowledge. The testing was done with a very small group of internal employees and after the testing I worked with that researcher to make some adjustments to the design.

One final review with the whole UX team helped refine a few last pieces.

I definitely feel like they’re the most polished version yet. The idea is that the large colored banner is displayed whenever someone’s qualification status changes, but if they remain in the status for a set time frame, it will swap to a less emphasized colored badge. This is to reduce the possibility of “banner blindness” so that when they become qualified or unqualified it will be a more impactful change that they notice.

After finalizing the design we reviewed a couple more times with developers and other stakeholders and prepared for launch!