Workspace Billing
The Billing Center is purposefully designed to streamline billing management, elevate overall financial operations, and provide insights into customer growth within the Workspace.
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The Billing Center is purposefully designed to streamline billing management, elevate overall financial operations, and provide insights into customer growth within the Workspace.
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All the artifacts, decisions, and consensus are derived from the extensive research I conducted, including
a heuristic evaluation of the legacy product, user entitlements and account hierarchy (Account Hierarchy Report, Entitlement Map)
user interviews to gain deeper insights into customer pain-points and needs
competitive analysis of other enterprise products
engineer workshops to understand their vision and exchange ideas for product development.
Workspace billing will live under the workspace setting tab within the secondary navigation "Billing Overview".
Benefit:
Easily access billing information specific to the current workspace.
User has a comprehensive view of all subscriptions, including site plans and account tiers.
Benefits:
Tabular view of launched sites with site plan details, renewal dates, and easy pagination, filtering, and search options.
All actions are consolidated into one dropdown menu, eliminating the need to navigate between multiple locations (Legacy User Dashboard, Legacy Site Dashboard, Site Plan Checkout, Site Plan Cadence Wizard).
User can access a complete invoice history, effortlessly download invoices as PDFs, and conveniently search by invoice number, date, and payment method.
Benefits:
Invoices are now decoupled from payers, sites, and payment methods, and are exclusively stored in the backend under the Workspace.
Users can effortlessly add payment methods without making a purchase, access card information, readily identify expired cards, and easily remove them as needed.
Benefits:
Payment Methods are now decoupled from specific payers and sites, collectively handled under the Workspace. This eliminated the learning curve of payment-site-payer association.
As the designer in this project, I was fortunate enough to partner with our sales engineers to hand select 10 customers (both of credit card customers and contracted customers).
I set up hour-long calls with each, and alongside my product manager, we used this time to conduct moderated usability testing. We shared the clickable prototype, and observed them as they navigated the interface and gave their feedback.
All of our notes from these sessions (including the script, and our analysis) are captured in a sheet like the one below.
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This process took a few weeks. At the end, we analyzed our notes and we presented the findings to the entire product team and finance team.
All the questions I had were answered easily in the interface?"
- Financial Administrator
All 10 participants from the finance and accounting department found the design to be highly intuitive, easy to navigate, and self-explanatory.
Out of the 10 participants, 8 were able to locate the billing information within a span of 60 seconds.
Among the participants, 5 out of 10 individuals mistakenly clicked on the User Avatar, assuming that the billing information would be located under the "Account" section in top navigation.
Based on my previous research, I discovered that in larger organizations, the individual responsible for billing may not necessarily be Tyler. It could be an accountant who logs in only for billing audits.
This raised two key questions in my mind:
How would users react if all administrators had access to and used all payment methods within a Workspace?
Does Pantheon need to introduce or modify existing roles for this project?
With these questions in mind, I promptly conducted another round of research with 6 selected customers.
1. We conducted a Card Sorting exercise where participants were provided with cards representing different permissions. Their task was to categorize the cards into predetermined groups (Admin, Team Member, Developer, Unprivileged) or create new groups as necessary.
2. In the Hypothetical User Scenarios, participants were presented with mockups of situations and asked behavioral questions to gauge their thoughts and identify potential issues for their team.
The majority of participants (5 out of 6) emphasized the importance of a dedicated Billing Admin role for large organizations to effectively handle their billing processes.
However, the absence of a Billing Admin role in the next 6 months is not considered a critical obstacle as participants have successfully implemented workarounds for the past 10 years.
Introducing an additional role has the potential risk to expand the project scope and cause delays, requiring increased engineering effort.
- Transition the pricing and packaging framework from selling Site Plans to selling Account Tiers
- Redesign the Checkout Flow to allow users to purchase account tiers and site plans for their Workspaces
- Develop a Pantheon Internal Tool for Customer Success Engineers to view Zuora accounts and subscriptions
- Introduce Billing Admin/Billing Manager as a role into Workspace Roles and Permissions.
- Introduce Billing Center for Enterprise customers
In November 2021, we launched the new Billing Center for all credit card customers. Over the next four weeks, our scrum team diligently reviewed and discussed customer feedback, enabling us to initiate bug fixes and implement improvements. Additionally, we leveraged the new Billing Center to incentivize users to transition to the new Workspace dashboard, establishing a mental model of the Workspace-centered architecture.
Given the intricate nature of the Billing architecture, the Enterprise Billing Center was deemed out of scope. However, this does not mean it was overlooked.
Following the November release, my Product Manager and I conducted a thorough review and determined the Enterprise Invoice as the next priority, considering the limitations in available resources during the holiday season.