Company Overview
EZCORP is a leading pawn broker company with several brands of stores in North and South America. They provide short term loans typically collateral based, but they also sell inventory either forfeited from these loans or buying from customers directly.
Problem & Goals
They needed a way to get their pawn brokers out onto the floor instead of staying behind the counter. It was common practice for the employees to stay behind the counter the majority of their shift. When reviewing the traffic in the store, it was determined there were many lost sales from customers who didn’t want to wait in line or couldn’t get the attention of the pawn brokers. Many times the line at the counter was for those making payments on their loans and layaways. It was decided to get some of the employees on the floor with tablets that could complete sales and put items on layaway.
Role
EZCORP started the project with an outside vendor, but they were working towards bringing all the design and development in-house. That’s where I came in.
In six months time, I was able to fully move the UX design decisions to the EZCORP team as the Lead UX Designer.
Tools
- Sketch
- Marvel
- Zeplin
- Jira
- Miro
- Lucidchart
- Trello
- Azure DevOps
Users
The users of the application consisted of the 7K+ pawn brokers in the pawn stores.
The tablet also allowed them to share the screen easily with the customers to help explain costs and payments.
Scope & Constraints
Development followed agile methodology utilizing two week sprints. The project had already had its first MVP release of retail sales before I started the project, and the second release adding layaway functionality happened soon after I started.
When asking about user testing and having direct access to the pawn brokers, I was told that was not part of their process. The group mainly relied on their stakeholder for requirements and input.
Process
Fortunately I started during the week that a discovery session had been scheduled. This helped give an overview of the next goals in mind based on user feedback and company decisions. Some of the first things I was able to tackle included emailing of receipts and paying on a sale with multiple tender types.
Team
First 3 months: 2 product owners & 2 UX designers with UX director on as needed basis
Next 3 months: 2 product owners, 1 UX designer & 1 senior UX designer
Remaining time on project: 1 product owner, 1 business analyst, and 1 lead UX designer
Split tender payment
The pawn brokers relayed to the business that there was a definite need for customers to pay with more than one type of payment method.
Research and analysis
After analyzing the percentage of transactions with multiple tender types, it was determined to focus our efforts on split payment with card and cash. There was a request to also be able to use store credit, but it was deprioritized after seeing the small number of transactions where this occurred.
After reviewing existing examples out in the wild, we looked primarily at a redesign of the Square experience for inspiration:
Design
User flow
The design example we drew inspiration from unfortunately utilized a flow we were not able to replicate in the EZROAM app. Based on the architecture of the checkout process, the UX team worked with the product team to come up with a flow within those constraints.
The most common interaction pattern would be for the user to pay with one payment method, process that payment, and then go back to the checkout with a reduced balance. However, the system handoff with the vendor, FreedomPay, that processed the card payment authorizations, completed the transaction once approved. Therefore, we needed to have the user determine the amount on the card and cash before processing the card payment.
Change in Goals
Processing loan and layaway payments was always on the roadmap, however, it was deemed a higher priority after the pandemic occurred.