Checkfront
Who's Checkfront?

Checkfront is the leader in the online booking space. Anywhere from Tours and Activities, to Rentals, and Accommodations. It provides merchants the ability to manage inventory, create invoices, process payments and ultimately bring their business online.

Integrated Waivers & Docs

Checkfront • Feb - Oct 2016 • My role: User Experience designer.

Led the designs of a streamline integrated experience for liability waivers and documents. Several merchants had been struggling with the various issues and logistics that paper waivers have. So we decided to build and design a product that would not only eliminate the need for paper waivers but introduce a new way to integrate legal documents to a booking reservation seamlessly.

The Challenge

Careful messaging and good customer flow was critical to mitigate the risk of cart abandonment and loss in conversion for merchants during checkout. Integrating the waivers and documents into the booking reservations needed to be seamless and a balancing act needed to be achieved with a back-end dashboard for merchants to manage and process customers through their activities.

Team & My Role

This project took place between Feb 2016 and Oct 2016. I worked on this project as a User Experience Designer. I was part of a small team alongside Developers Ben Allison, Jason Michael, Kris Lemberg and Product Manager Stephanie Brachat. I was responsible for the research, interaction design, visual design, user experience, and copywriting for the Waivers and Documents project.

The Vision

We had a singular message to drive home: Waivers & Documents would be integrated with booking reservations. Goodbye old dusty paper! Welcome digital bliss! Our vision included new features that would promote secure, reliable and safe storage of their waivers & documents.

Phase One

Gather

Stakeholder interviews

I conducted interviews with representatives from Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Support, and Executive Leadership to understand each part of the company’s unique requirements and concerns for the design. I collected internal feedback, cross-referenced it with user feedback, and prioritized design changes.

Qualitative Interviews

Adventure and activity providers were the key merchants we needed to focus on. They were very high priority users that processed a huge amount of waivers and documents yearly. In order to ensure that they were factored into the design, I conducted a set of interviews with those merchants. The conversation was tailored to each merchant, and I used this information as the basis of our design phases.

Participatory Design

I worked and engaged alongside a prominent local merchant in the industry to gather customer flows, use cases and scenarios. They were of great help to learn and understand their experience and problems. We collaborated on many ideas and features from which we would use to create our first iteration.

Competitive Analysis

I conducted a light competitive analysis and used it to benchmark which elements our competition was prioritizing in comparison to us. It turned out that we actually had a great position over our competition with our ability to integrate and attach waivers directly to booking reservations.

Phase Two

Build

Major Components

This was a big project that had three main components: creating and editing the waivers, managing and logging their status, and capturing customer information during checkout.
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Template Editor

I explored the many different ways a user would be able to create and edit a waiver. Through a series of iterations we landed on a drag and drop system. It would provide a more intuitive experience and help the merchants visualize what was needed, similar to a checklist. We extended the functionality to include any type of document templates; medical, legal, school related, events or a simple form.

The use of InVision was greatly utilized to facilitate communication and design direction. It allowed the team to step through the user journey interactively and spot any missing touchpoints.

Document Manager

We also created a management layer for waivers and documents. Merchants would be able to view and verify waivers and documents, share and/or send them to new and existing participants.

Checkout Process

The biggest and most daunting part of this project was the design of the checkout process. We knew from stakeholder and customer interviews that there would be contention around the risk of conversion loss. We conducted a survey to answer the question whether or not merchants would want to have the waivers signed before or after payment.

Another big hurdle was around the legalities for underage participants. We had to be very careful to make sure minors were taken into account when signing waivers for risky activities. Multiple iterations of designs were done to flesh out the different permutations to ensure our merchant’s legal requirements could be met.

Prototypes

I worked closely with our developer Ben Alison and Jason Michael to bring our designs to life as a working prototype. Communicating requirements face-to-face and discussing constraints and possibilities was an effective way of solving the Interaction Design. We worked collaboratively, tested constantly and iterated progressively.

Wireframes & Mockups

As the design was established, we began creating the structure and hierarchy of the design, as well as the visual care.

Wireframe
Mockups
pHase Three

Teachings

Rewards

It was extremely rewarding to work on a project that generated such measurable impact for both Checkfront and our merchants.

Positive Vibes

The impact on Sales was very positive. Seeing our sales team excited and engaged to upsell our packages due to the work we did with the waivers and documents projects was a fantastic feeling.

Expectations

New timelines, resourcing issues, and reprioritization meant the scope of the project was constantly changing. I had to adapt to those changes and still deliver the best design.

Phase Four

Final Designs

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The views expressed here are entirely my own and are not those of my employer
© Demetre Papaiakovou • Disclaimer