Transaction Disputes Redesign

My Role

Design Director: My responsibilities included leading strategy, stakeholder alignment, design principles, usability testing, and product outcomes. Managed design team (1 lead designer on replatforming + supporting designers), partnered with engineering, compliance, and business stakeholders.

Context & Problem

The platform change presented an opportunity to improve the customer-facing self-service experience, but stakeholders had different priorities, and the business needed a clear, executable plan.

Customer pain: after submitting a digital dispute, users didn’t know what to expect next and averaged ~3 support calls per dispute (initially calling immediately after submission and again for status updates).

Objectives

  • Align stakeholders on a unified customer experience and a prioritized roadmap.
  • Reduce call center volume by improving self-service clarity and status transparency.
  • Rebuild the digital dispute flow to enable customers to complete disputes confidently, eliminating the need for follow-up calls.
  • Integrate required legal/compliance content without overwhelming users.
Sharing ideas during the workshop
Discussing the prioritization of our ideas during the workshop

Approach

  1. Stakeholder alignment workshop
    • Ran a human-centered design workshop to surface perspectives, empathize with customers, and prioritize outcomes.
    • Outcome: shared vision, prioritized roadmap, and a single definition of success that replaced many recurring status meetings.
  2. Parallel execution
    • One designer partnered tightly with engineers to replatform backend systems for compliance.
    • The design team focused on the front-end customer journey, aligning it with the workshop roadmap.
  3. Quick win: improve Dispute Status Tracker
    • Expanded the tracker to include more transaction types and richer status information, enabling users to understand next steps and timelines better.
  4. Research-driven redesign
    • Consulted digital business partners and analyzed customer behaviors.
    • Synthesized insights into three guiding design principles: Care, Clarity, and Confidence.
    • Redesigned the flow into simplified, discrete steps; integrated compliance/legal content contextually so it informed without overwhelming.
  5. Iterative validation
    • Conducted usability testing in waves; used qualitative feedback + task success metrics to iterate.

Key Design Principles

  • Care: acknowledge disruption and show empathy through tone and guidance.
  • Clarity: make next steps, responsibilities, and timelines explicit.
  • Confidence: provide evidence and confirmations so users trust the outcome and feel supported.

My Contributions

  • Designed and facilitated the stakeholder workshop to achieve alignment and a prioritized roadmap.
  • Helped define the product success criteria and mapped the customer journey.
  • Led the formulation of Care, Clarity, and Confidence principles and translated them into screens, microcopy, and interaction patterns.
  • Oversaw iterative usability testing and incorporated findings into revisions.
  • Coordinated design collaboration with engineers working on the replatform.

Tools & Methods

  • Workshop facilitation, journey mapping, design principles, low-to-high fidelity prototyping, moderated usability testing, iterative A/B-style validation, and engineering collaboration.
Setting user expectations helped customers complete the digital flow
Incorporating disclosures in context increased comprehension
Breaking up the digital flow in simplified steps ensured task completion while feeling more efficient
The information incorporated into this step addressed common reasons why customers called after completing the flow
Allowing customers to make corrections before completion increased accuracy and digital containment
Clear acknowledgment of completion with next steps reduced the customer’s need to call

Results & Impact

  • Immediate improvement: Enhancements to the Dispute Status Tracker reduced average calls per dispute from ~3 to <2.
  • Flow redesign usability: initial testing showed more than 75% improvement in customer feedback metrics; only 30% of participants said they would call after completing the new flow.
  • Continued iterations achieved more than 95% comprehension — users understood the actions they took and reported the experience as easy and trustworthy.
  • Operational benefit: the workshop-driven roadmap reduced cross-functional meeting overhead and enabled focused execution.

Lessons & Takeaways

Parallel workstreams (replatform + customer experience) are feasible with a strong shared roadmap and tight cross-functional collaboration.

Early alignment via human-centered workshops prevents costly rework and reduces meeting overhead.

Minor, focused improvements (status visibility) can deliver fast, measurable operational impact while larger redesigns are in progress.

Clear, empathy-led design principles enable compliance content to be integrated without diminishing usability.