Visa's stated purpose is to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.
This is achieved through Visa's payment network alongside various technologies and extend it.
One of these technologies is Click to Pay, an EMVco standard for online payments.
Before 2019, the four major card networks had their own online checkout solutions, with Visa's being Visa Checkout.
The consumer portal for managing Click to Pay, internally known as the Destination Site, dates back to the creation of Visa Checkout.
With the EMVco standarization of the Click to Pay specification, the goal was for issuing banks to adopt and implement Click to Pay the same way that Contactless was implemented.
As a result, the expectation was that management of Click to Pay as a feature would be implemented by issuing banks and not by payment networks. This led to the deprioritization of work and improvement
This meant that the overall look, feel, and architecture for the Destinationa Site has remained the same despite the update in branding in 2019.
By 2022, issuers largely still hadn't adopted management of Click to Pay as a card feature, meaning that the Destination Site was still in use.
Over the next year and a half, there were brief attempts at updating parts of the site, as well as occasional deliberations on redesigning and rebuilding the whole thing, but nothing ever really progressed, largely due to a lack of prioritization.
The team had explored a simple reskin of the Destination Site, but the tech response was that the scope would not be able to be limited to just a new look; there were under-the-hood changes that would be required that could not be prioritized.
Around the same time, I was assigned to work on updating the registration flow for the Destination Site so that we could begin to support enhanced means of identity verification as well as new technologies including Passkeys.
By Early 2024, it was decided that we should completely redesign the Destination Site.
The additional features that we would need the Destination Site to support had become prioritized, therefore we needed to improve the site's overall experience as much as possible.
I worked with my Product Manager counterparts to outline our objectives:
- We needed to adopt Visa's currrent design system for brand cohesion and for accessibility compliance.
- We needed to envision the redesigned Destination Site as a framework so that new features could be accommodated more easily in the future.
We also had some limitations to start off with:
- Engineering capacity and prioritization was still undetermined, but we would be working with a technical architect in the meantime.
- We would not be able to get support from our design research org in the near-term, and the existing destination site lacked proper instrumentation, so our ability to work with actual data was limited.
I started this process by breaking down the objects that users interact with in the portal into their constituent metadata and worked on linking everything together.
From there, I worked on drafts of different information architectures, focusing on applying heuristics and other design principles.
Our planned next steps were to develop wireframes of the different information architecutures and work with my design research counterparts to conduct some user testing.
About one month into this process, we began to hear that the team working on Visa Payment Passkeys was about to begin work on their own consumer-facing website.
Instead of creating two different websites for cardholder to adminster features on their Visa cards, we decided it would make more sense to work towards one single website that we began calling the Visa Consumer Portal.
The Passkeys designer and I started to audit the progress of our respective projects while working with our product counterparts to determine how we should move forward.
This new project scope led to some new considerations:
- Click to Pay's backend was outdated, and any substantial changes were out of scope. Meanwhile, everything for the Passkeys side was going to be all-new.
- We had flagged another product for cardholders to manage marketing opt-in, but we did not know if they would want to migrate to this unified platform.
The technical limitations meant that we had to decide between two approaches:
- Either we would create one single website that would attempt to bridge between data coming from two separate backends until the Click to Pay backend could be rearchitected,
- Or we would create a shared design language and deploy two separate portals until the Click to Pay backend could be rearchitected and the two portals could be consolidated.
The biggest constraint, however, was that a new portal to enable Passkeys management was planned to be launched in August, with engineers beginning work at the start of June.
These converstations were happening in mid-April, meaning we had six to eight weeks to hand-off to engineering.
We mapped out the next eight weeks of work in two week chunks, starting with getting aligned on a high level.
To make sure we were all grounded in the same vocabulary and mental model, I led us on the same data objects and information architecture exercise that I had used to start the Destination Site redesign.
We then used that data objects model and iterated through various information architectures, relying on peer and stakeholder feedback to determine what path of nagivation would make the most sense for the majority of use cases and jobs to be done.
Next we started to explore the UI itself.
We worked through several different layouts concepts, relying on peer critique to iterate and move forwards.
At this point, we had to do an initial hand-off to engineering so that they could begin scoping their work.
We had decided on main page layout and componentized the layout to support modularization, especially since it had been decided that Click to Pay and Payment Passkeys would maintain separate portals in the near-term.
While we ultimately delivered the MVP Consumer Portal designs on-time, due to various factors the redesigned Click to Pay Consumer Portal wouldn't launch until a year later in mid-June 2025.
The goal of creating a modular and extensible framework was accomplished, however, as our ability to support additional functionality from a design and front-end standpoint was greatly improved.
The recency of the new Portal's launch, lack of instrumentation for the former Destination Site, as well as low overall adoption of Click to Pay means that any improvements cannot be easily quantified, however.