It’s the middle of the month. You know your bill payments are looming.

How do you feel about that?

Chances are, you’re not exactly jumping for joy at the thought of dropping a couple hundred bucks on these necessities. The fact is, some internal screaming might occur as you imagine the dent in your paycheck.

Let’s go one step further and think about your bill process. Logging into different websites, mailing cheques, doing bank transfers.

Toby is basically the human personification of bills, am I right?

If you’ve been living in Singapore the past 17 years, your pain and suffering might have been alleviated by the existence of AXS kiosks. They’re basically a one-stop station (900 of them islandwide!) where you can pay most types of bills, fines, and loans.

Since 2013, they have also released e-Stations and m-Stations, where you can make payments through their website and mobile . Which means you can pay that SingTel bill whenever you want and wherever you are without having to drop by a kiosk near you.

But I’m not here to promote how great the AXS service is.

On the contrary, my team and I had a bone to pick with them — namely, their m-Station. Considering AXS’s reliable and varied services, it has so much potential to be something great.

For Project 3 of the UX Design Immersive Course in General Assembly, my team and I decided to the AXS Payment app to make paying bills at least a little less uncomfortable.

Let’s get down and dirty with the process.

The first step towards creating a better product is to put yourselves in the shoes of your users. There are many, many, many articles out there that can explain it better than me. That’s exactly what my teammates, Daniel, Jen, and I did for 10 days.

Brand Research

The three of us roughly knew what AXS does, but that’s not enough. To start us off, we went into the specifics with searches into their history, the extent of their services, their partners, competitors, and more. This process made it so much easier to know what we’re working with and what our app should cover, not letting our app fall short of expectations.

This process included plotting a Brand Positioning graph against AXS’s competitors and doing a SWOT analysis — both to inform us of opportunities to leverage upon and also obstacles to overcome.

Heuristic Evaluation

We conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing AXS app to determine its usability using LEMErS. At first glance we could already tell that the UI needed an overhaul because of its plain and stale design. Among other things, there was little learnability, inefficient loading screens, low on memorability, little error management, and dissatisfaction in use.

Being mostly a utility app, though, our choice wasn’t exactly low-hanging fruit. Despite its low score during the heuristic evaluation, the app does what it says it does — albeit not in a very enjoyable experience.

Content Inventory

We had to be really sure just how extensive the AXS services are, so we did a content audit of the existing app. It was a mundane and time-consuming task but necessary for us to cover all bases.

From everything that we’ve done so far, we crafted a few proto-personas to guide us along in our journey, so that we can keep in mind the personality and needs of our target users.

User Research

We were ready to commence the research phase! Some user interviews were carried out to validate our proto-personas. In addition to their demographics, we asked our participants questions to explore their bill-paying process, difficulties faced, and their perception towards the AXS brand.

After a lengthy session of interviews and affinity mapping, the results allowed us to narrow down into some pain points that we knew we had to overcome with the new app:

It may seem like a lot of problems to solve, but I was secretly glad that this was the case, for it seemed like even one change would be a huge improvement.

We were then able to refine our proto-personas into our actual personas being the target users of AXS.


Primary persona: Jordan Tan
As a career-driven millennial, Jordan is our ideal target user. He has a new car, new house, and a new wife — a lifestyle that comes with plenty of bills to pay. As a 32-year-old he’s at the age of financial stability with multiple credit cards, and probably has a terrible work-life balance. This means he needs a hassle-free way to pay multiple bills so he can focus on things that matter, like his wife and his job.

Secondary persona: Anita Sanjay
Anita is a 23-year old undergraduate at NUS and is an emerging young adult full of hopes and dreams for the future. She first knew about AXS from her mother who asked her to run some errands and is now starting to learn how to manage her own financial responsibilities. What she needs most right now is a mobile platform to ease her into adulthood that also complements her youthful lifestyle of food, travel, and dating.

Tertiary Persona: Roslinah Amir
Roslinah is a 62-year-old housewife who just entered retirement. She takes care of almost everyone in her life — her elderly parents, her husband, and her children. Being one of the early adopters of the AXS kiosk during her time, her loyalty to AXS is unquestionable. What she needs right now is a way to seamlessly transition from the kiosk to the app so she wouldn’t be left out of Singapore’s SMARTNation movement.

Customer Journey Maps (CJM)

As an exercise of empathy, CJMs allow us to understand our users’ journey before, during, and after interacting with our products. This process is also invaluable in exploring some opportunities in how we can improve their experience in every step of the way.

We crafted all three persona CJMs and produced an app that addressed all of their pain points. However, for the purpose of this project and prototype, we will only be focusing on Jordan’s user flow.

Tree Test

A short segue into some information architecture came in the form of tree-testing. Using Optimal Workshop, we carried out a test to validate how we’d reorganise the categories in the existing AXS app. There were 6 tasks completed by 23 participants aged 21–30 years old.

Promising results with the exception of one necessary change, and then we finalised our new categorisation.

Feature Prioritisation

Featuritis is an actual thing. Keeping only the necessary and useful features ensure a smoother user experience and reduces user effort in achieving their goal. We wanted to add so many things and solve ALL THE PROBLEMS! But every project has its constraints, and ours boiled down to lack of resources and time. To help us streamline this brainstorming process, we used the Moscow Method.

At the very least, we knew that our product has to have the features in the first column.

It’s prototyping time.

I can’t say for sure yet that our initial prototype was any good, but that’s why usability testing exists.

Usability Testing

Clickable prototype in hand, we earnestly and eagerly did a round of usability testing, wide-eyed and hoping that we have a good product on our hands. We had 5 participants, aged 25–36 years old. We tested the app based on whether our users were able to complete all 6 tasks that were given to them.

Unfortunately, due to the constraints of the interaction within our prototype, our users weren’t able to complete some of the tasks. However, the options they selected still exists within the scope of our product, so we took the results with a grain of salt and proceeded with the iterations.


It wasn’t realistic for us to complete all the iterations from the feedback that the usability test provided us with, so we plotted it against a 2×2 matrix for feature prioritisation.

We carried on to iterate based on the changes that were easy to implement and essential to have.

With that, it was a matter of making it high-fidelity such that it looks legitimate and professional, something worthy of the AXS brand.

The Redesigned AXS App

The new and updated features include but are not limited to:

  1. Scan and pay: The beloved function of the AXS kiosk is transferred to the app experience. Scan the barcode and the system fetches the account information for you.
  2. Multiple bill payments: Payments are more efficient with a “checkout” page where you can add multiple bills and pay all at once.
  3. Tracking of payment status: Since AXS is a third party app, users are concerned whether the payments are processed through to the organisations. This feature eases that worry.
  4. Saving your account details: The redesigned app makes it easier to pay recurring monthly bills with the option to save your favourite organisations for easy access the next time you log on.
  5. Higher security: With Touch ID login and one-time password features, the redesigned app takes users’ security and data protection into higher consideration.

Special thanks to my teammates Oh ruey Jen and Daniel Wee, for this project would not have been possible without their collaboration and mutual guidance.

What do you think of the redesign? Feel free to leave some 👏👏👏👏👏 and a comment below if you enjoyed reading!


A User-centric Redesign of the AXS Payment App was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Source link https://blog.prototypr.io/a-user-centric-redesign-of-the-axs-payment-app-7761fd8e7ca4?source=rss—-eb297ea1161a—4


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