Helping e-commerce fight fraud
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps enterprises fight fraud while they keep their doors open for genuine customers and partners. This tool provides capabilities to create rules for processing transactions, as a result, some of the transactions automatically blocked, some proceeded, and some got into a “grey area” that needs human review to approve or reject them. I worked on the first version of manual review capabilities.
Overview
In this project, I stepped into a researcher role to better understand the process, the users, and their goals.
Key areas to explore were:
What are the processes and goals for different personas?
How we can help our personas achieve their goals?
What would be the minimal set of capabilities that we can provide to customers that satisfy their main goals?
Business goal
Create a meaningful MVP for manual review of fraudulent transactions to extend core product capabilities.
Role and duration
Lead UX designer & co-researcher for this area. I worked closely with another UX researcher, PMs, and a team of engineers.
June 2020 - July 2020
Project context
We planned two phases of the research:
For the first phase, we wanted a better understanding of the current process and the main goals, and evaluate a feature concept.
For the second phase, we aimed to understand the usability of the minimal set of capabilities.
How transactions are being processed
Based on previous interviews, we mapped the current fraud protection processes. In the upcoming studies, we wanted to understand how similar or different they are in different companies.
Personas
We already knew our primary personas from the previous user interviews. However, we wanted to add more details about these roles and their jobs-to-be-done during the first phase of the research. We couldn't address all the pain points in the first version of the feature, but it’s important to be aware of them and tackle them later.
Concept research
We asked research participants to rank scenarios, highlight the crucial functionality that is missing, etc. We received overall positive feedback and some insights about the process and goals that helped us iterate and prioritize work.
Second research and final designs
We ran a second phase of the research with a high-fidelity prototype. For this phase, I was looking to get feedback on specific pieces of the UI, for example, the information hierarchy, summaries, and trends.
Queue summary and list
Queue summary is a place for the fraud manager to understand the current workload to allocate and prioritize resources. It also serves as a starting point for the case agent to understand the current trend and prioritize the cases.
Initial hypothesis: managers need to understand the current state of the queue to allocate resources.
Research findings: true, but so do the case agents. This helps them review transactions in a group to speed-up the work.
Transaction details
This area provides all available information about a transaction in the review.
Initial hypothesis: the agents need all available information to make a decision.
Research findings: true, and they need to make it fast and correct. A custom layout would help them to achieve this. We were not able to provide customization of the page and layout in this version, but we prioritized and grouped information based on the feedback.
"This is very nice - it's very robust. I like this way better. It shows me way more information. I am really impressed right now."
- Research participant.
Queue performance
Initial hypothesis: managers need to understand the state of the queue to learn about fraud patterns.
Research findings: true, but they also want to understand how the rule engine performs and how the team deals with volume in different periods.
Team performance
Initial hypothesis: managers need to understand the team performance to help agents succeed..
Research findings: true, but they want to see trends from the coaching perspective. Even if the team is not performing well, they want to understand whether they improved at all.
"I want to see trends. I need to see how you've progressed."
- Research participant.
Conclusion
During this project, I stepped into the researcher role as well as continued my design work. Being closer to the user brings tremendous and sometimes unexpected insights about the users’ needs, processes, and business opportunities. With the first version, we were not able to meet every single customer need, but we created core capabilities that cover the majority of the use-cases and received positive customer feedback. It also sparked meaningful conversations within the product team about the future of the whole product.