I leveraged existing customer feedback to define gaps in the user experience, and performing competitive analysis helped start the foundational work as soon as possible. I used this information to inform low-fidelity prototypes that could be the basis for rapid usability testing with existing merchants.

As the design lead I drove collaboration and feedback across teams while providing weekly updates to the Payments leadership group.

After clarifying the product scope I began work on high-fidelity prototypes and user journey diagrams, collaborating closely with engineering on implementation details throughout the process to avoid knowledge gaps during handoff. Every step of the user journey was prototyped and documented in Figma to make things easier to translate into code. We ran staging builds regularly to ensure the final experience felt seamless in use. Updates were documented at the organization level to encourage feedback from all stakeholders.

Merchants often don't understand the liability or responsibility that comes with accepting payments online. During usability testing we discovered that merchants would enable every filter thinking that this would would be the best way to protect their store from fraud. This challenged the assumption that more transparent choice was better for the user. The actual outcome was that enabling everything without careful configuration led to nearly every incoming transaction being blocked.

I spent a lot of time refining how the advanced controls were presented and information was communicated. I proposed an onboarding flow that focused on communicating the benefits of these tools rather than plaguing the merchant with having to make a technical decision. The tools were released with two levels of control:

• basic, on by default

• advanced, optional opt-in

The basic tools communicated the base level of protection available to all merchants across the WooPayments network, while the advanced opt-in allowed merchants to have more granular control over how aggressively their incoming transactions were screened.

The final design took care to explain how each filter worked and what its specific benefit is to the merchant. Presenting the information as benefits before choices led to greater intentional use of the feature rather than just passive user adoption.