Matt's Design Philosophy
A metaphor
I don't care how much this joke gets overused, I still love it. But I'm going to take the stance of "poor guy on Twitter who doesn't understand the joke".
Even when designing simple things, we are creating cubes, not rectangles.
Rectangles are 2D and can't hold a lot. They appear finite. The cube, on the other hand, is 3D. Even though it also has plenty of constraints, it just feels more substantial and capable of actually holding things.
Because unless you are doing this:
Your design is so, so much more than what the end result appears to be, even when it ends up looking like a rectangle with text in it:
The high-level process
High-value prospects and current users with growing businesses needed a solution capable of paying all of their vendors, not just some of them. By offering cross-border payments in both the app and the API, Routable would be a product that spans several market segments and be incredibly sticky throughout a company’s lifecycle.
Summary & Timelines
This initiative spanned several epics over the course of about 1 year. In this section, I'll give a brief summary of each epic and what my involvement was.
If you only have time to read one, go with the last one: "Cross-Border Payments and International Vendors".
Q3 2021 – Q4 2021
Initial Beta API support
This was the first step required to support cross-border payments, and it also allowed Routable to pick up some early beta clients.
This epic is noteworthy for a couple reasons, even though I had no involvement. Another designer had done some initial design explorations for read-only information that would eventually get shipped, which I’ll talk about later. This is also where the tech lead laid the groundwork for constraints I would need to keep in mind in subsequent epics.
Q3 2021 – Q4 2021
Cross-Border Payment Data Syncing with Accounting Software
There's timing overlap between the previous epic and this one — I was actually on the Accounting Software Integrations pod during this time. Due to the priority of cross-border payments to the company, we needed to understand how data from these transactions would sync with clients' accounting software.
Flow diagramming, customer surveys, object-oriented UX, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration were the primary methods used to make confident decisions for the MVP and following iterations.
I've decided not to share this work because it is more typical of a UX Designer's (and somewhat, a Product Manager's) responsibilities as opposed to a Product Designer's. I was happy to do the work, but I'm focused on showcasing end-to-end Product Design which the next two epics do well.
Q4 2021 – Q1 2022
Cross-Border CSV Upload
I switched to the payment methods pod in Q4 and was immediately put on a project to update the CSV Upload feature to support cross-border payments. Discovery had been completed prior to me joining the team, and shipping this update would allow clients to efficiently send many (think hundreds) of payments simultaneously in the web app.
Auditing existing workflows, solution exploration, prototyping, and developer collaboration were the primary methods used to ship this update.
Q2 2022
Cross-Border Payments and International Vendors
This epic (technically two epics combined) encompassed all that was left for Routable to have a holistic MVP solution for Cross-Border payments in the web app. This ended up being a lot of work in a short amount of time! And as a result, it was a bit of a roller coaster.
Auditing existing workflows, solution exploration, object-oriented UX, prototyping, and developer collaboration were the primary methods used.
This case study is in-progress.
