PayFast Merchant Dashboard
The goal of this project was to re-create the PayFast merchant Dashboard, that merchants use to manage their payments, third party integrations, process refunds and pay money out to their bank accounts. We aimed to create an experience that was similar but had an improved experience.
We made the decision to run the new dashboard in parallel with the old version for 2 reasons.
1. Slow gradual change would make it easier for merchants to adapt to the new dashboard as opposed to a completely new experience dropping and shocking merchants.
We made the decision to run the new dashboard in parallel with the old version for 2 reasons.
1. Slow gradual change would make it easier for merchants to adapt to the new dashboard as opposed to a completely new experience dropping and shocking merchants.
2. We used to phased roll-out to do research while we were developing. We tracked usage, success rates and asked users to report on issues they were having. In doing this it allowed us to fix bugs and improve the experience while still developing the new dashboard.
We rolled out the entire project in 15 releases. With each release we also included knowledge-base articles to help merchants with onboarding to new processes if they wanted it.
Once the project was fully released we switched the default dashboard to being the new dashboard so that we could track how many users were switching back to the old version. As we approached the deprecation date, the number of users using the old version continued to get smaller. When we did finally turn off the old version of the dashboard users were already experienced at using the new dashboard. We hosted a webinar, where I took our merchants through all the most-used features of the dashboard and I followed up the demo with a Q&A session.
