Contractor Only Plan

Growing Wave's active paying businesses and long term revenue by redefining the suboptimal user experience of business owners paying contractors today

Today, Contractor Only Businesses (COBs) shy away from using Wave Payroll because of our inaccessible price and lack of off-cycle payments. This is supported by Wave survey data, user interviews, a fake door test, and competitors having dedicated plans for COBs.

The Contractor only plan is a high-value opportunity to capture market share that we are currently missing. We want to be able to create a seamless workflow for COBs.

MY ROLE

Product Designer

As the sole designer, I crafted the end-to-end experience of Wave's Contractor Only Plan. I incorporated user research and testing to create a new payment workflow that consolidates all Bills and payment information into one flow. I collaborated cross-functionally across a team of engineers, a product manager, compliance lead, content designers, UX researchers, customer support and risk analyst team to ensure all stakeholders had visibility into the design process. 

DURATION

Sept 2022 - Oct 2023

TEAM

1 Product manager
2 Engineers
1 Compliance lead

PLATFORM + CLIENT

Desktop, Wave Payroll

TOOLS

Figma, Figjam, Dovetail

PROJECT BACKGROUND

Churns due to poor product model fit for contractors represented the third most common reason for users leaving Wave in 2021. 

The high level approach in solving this problem is to create a special pricing plan for this user segment (COBs).

Top 10 reasons why customers churned in 2021 Jan-Sept

We conducted user interviews to further understand contractor only business owner's needs. Our data revealed that: 

01

Business owners need to hire contractors when their workload increases or their clients require skills that are outside their ability

The motivation for hiring contractors occurs when business owners:

• Become too busy and require contractors to help alleviate some of their work
• Have clients that require a certain skill that they cannot offer and therefore need to outsource the job to a contractor instead

02

Business owners prefer being able to make off-cycle payments when paying their contractors 

Users prefer to pay their contractors on an off-cycle basis so that they can ensure their contractors are being paid in a timely and efficient manner. 

This is important to business owners because they want to be able to maintain a good and trusting relationship with their contractors and to be able to look professional in the eyes of their contractors.

03

Business owners value having all of their financial tools live in one place 

Users love Wave because of the integrated features that allow them to streamline their business finances.

Users appreciate how financial tools such as Invoicing, Accounting, and Payroll are able to be accessed and managed through a single, unified platform.

Reasons why users like this are due to convenience, familiarity and simplicity. 

The first key job to be done is a digital and flexible payment. In our conversations with COBs, 70% of customers needed this flexibility.

For business owners that pay contractors through Wave today, they must do a manual workaround of choosing to pay their contractors on a weekly pay cycle.

THE CURRENT EXPERIENCE

Evaluating the current user journey path for business owners today

For business owners paying their contractors through Wave today, their journey begins once they've finished onboarding and land on the Run Payroll screen. In order to begin initiating a contractor payment, users must go to a different area in the navigation (Purchases > Bills). 

In this current flow it's not intuitive to the user how to create contractor payments or where they would have to go in order to do so.

INTRODUCING A NEW NAVIGATION

Core payment flow

Ideating design solutions

The initial solution proposed to leverage the Bills current workflow and provide redirects into Bills from the Run Payroll dashboard. I saw an opportunity to introduce paying contractors as its own area under the Payroll navigation, which in comparison to the current experience, would reduce visual clutter, minimize excess navigation, and simplify the user experience.

In the new contractor payment flow, instead of a user's journey beginning on the Run Payroll dashboard, we now have a dedicated navigation for COBs. Business owners that onboard into the new Contractor Only Plan now land on the "Pay contractors" tab within the navigation, eliminating the need for a user to have to search where to go in order to initiate their first contractor payment.

I designed a calendar view that provided the user with the ability to create off-cycle  payments - allowing the business owner to be able to choose when they want their payment to go out to their contractor, as opposed to being restricted to a payroll cycle.

EXPLORING IDEAS

Dashboard design

I designed an all-in-one contractor payment transactions dashboard. This allowed the user to have a single view for their scheduled and completed contractor payments, all in the same place.

Due to the v1 scope of this project only supporting direct deposit payments, I provided the appropriate redirects into Bills in order to support users that would prefer to create contractor payments through other payment methods (such as cash or check). Since the technicality of the contractor payment flow also involved creating automatic Bills attached to contractor payments in the back-end, I wanted to surface this information to the user in the front-end as well to inform them of where they could go in order to view the bill attached to their contractor payment. I simplified the visual detail necessary to convey each unit of information so that the dashboard felt easily navigable without being overwhelming.

USABILITY TESTING

Validating effectiveness of the designs

In the new workflow designed for contractor only businesses I tested how easily users could go through the process of creating, editing, and deleting a contractor payment. I also tried to understand users’ interpretation of the in-app copy and explored how users would utilize the note feature for a contractor payment.

My goal for this research project was to validate the effectiveness of the designs for this new contractor payment flow.

After testing was conducted, I tagged the user interviews to highlight important learnings and organized the information into findings and insights to identify any common patterns or themes based on user feedback.

FINDINGS & INSIGHTS

I synthesized the findings and insights from usability testing into 3 main themes:

01

Business owners want to maintain a good and trusting relationship with their contractors

In the moderated tests, 9/11 business owners expressed wanting to maintain this trusting relationship by emphasizing the importance of having their contractors paid in a timely and efficient manner, and by stating that they would expect clear and timely communication from Wave regarding the status of contractors' payments, including notifications for when payments have been processed and deposited into the contractor’s accounts.

02

Business owners want to track their payments with detail to ensure their transactions are accurately bookkept.

There were 4 common findings that supported this insight:

1. When it comes to payment method, 6/11 users stated they preferred direct deposit payments over manual payments (i.e. cash/check) due to being able to track their payments more seamlessly electronically
2. During testing, 2/11 users stated that their current contractor payment process involves utilizing a bill because it allows them to have that accurate record
3. When asked if business owners would utilize the note feature on a contractor payment, 11/11 users stated they would use it as a record of the job that was done by their contractor
4. 6/11 users stated that their current contractor payment process involves having an invoice alongside the payment in order to prove the reason for payment

All 4 methods in which business owners track their payments are due to wanting to keep their transactions accurately booked and to ensure their business is legally compliant.

03

Business owners appreciate user-friendly software

In both moderated and unmoderated tests, users described going through the process of the contractor payment flow (whether that be creating, editing, or deleting a payment), simple, straightforward, fast and easy to use.

ITERATING

Incorporating user feedback post testing

Although most users found the designs easy to use, there were 2 main areas where users got stuck.

• When users were given the task to create a payment for their contractor, 6/16 users would gravitate their cursor towards adding a payment before entering the calendar date 
• During testing, we also found that 6/16 users would try and add a payment to their contractor through the filter UI element first before going to the contractor name directly

Both points of friction and the research insights encouraged the need to iterate on designs.

To mitigate confusion of users going into 'Add payment' first, I synced with content strategists to change the copy. The section title now says ‘Select a date to get started’, and the copy related to past or manual payments is underneath the date picker as opposed to above since it would be an edge case.

The filter UI element was removed since it proved to be more confusing than it was helpful.

Lastly, the payment modal was iterated to include an invoice uploading option. The reason for the invoice uploading field is to support the user's job to be done of attaching an invoice to their contractor payment in order to track their transactions with accuracy.

Design reviews & validation

In order to verify the proposed design solutions and ensure design reviews were conducted effectively, I led reviews in increments of 30, 60 and 90% completion while looping in the appropriate stakeholders at each stage. This included incorporating product, research, content, engineering, compliance, risk, and our customer support team to ensure we were providing COBs with a superior payment experience. 

Edge cases were also incorporated into the design reviews to ensure we were considering various different user journeys.

Conclusion & next steps

This project adequately addressed Wave's market gap by providing a payment experience for contractor only business owners and addressed the user problem by incorporating off-cycle payments. The core payment experience was one of many parts of the Contractor Only Plan that I worked on. My other responsibilities included re-designing the landing page to incorporate this new plan, as well as designing the onboarding and plan switching experience. Wave's Contractor Only Plan is expected to go live on the web application in late fall 2023. Next steps will be to evaluate the user feedback collected post plan launch, and to use this data to improve the product.