Problem: Affiliate marketing is complicated and our users (merchants) are having a tough time getting up and running. Refersion is a SaaS product, allowing merchants to recruit, manage, and pay affiliates to help them sell products. The leadership at Refersion wanted to “figure out the ideal simple flow, so a user can come in, get started, sign-up affiliates, understand if they’re real people, and then pay them out.”
Goal: After wisely deciding to take a “time & materials” approach in the SOW (instead of a messier template-focused approach), the goal was simply to make as much progress as possible in a few specific areas: Onboarding, Management, and Payment.
Contribution: Contracting with Heatwaves, I led this project from the beginning up to the final Visual Design sprint. The project consisted of seven one-week sprints and had a locked budget.
Requirements gathering: The two requirements-gathering sprints focused on analyzing the current state and conducting phone interviews with their existing users.
Interaction design: The ID sprints focused on: Improving the onboarding from a 14 step process to an 8 step process; Creating three powerful templates (List, Detail, Overlay) to cover all of 20+ management views; And, several other enhancements (not pictured): Affiliate sign-up; Payment flow; And new navigation.
Results: Our production exceeded expectations and we were able to establish strong trust with the client and will be doing additional work for them in the future after they deploy and test the work we delivered a few weeks ago.