Jiahao Chen

Launched in Aug 2019, Alipay oversea tuition payment is a new product, as part of of Alipay’s cross-border payments solutions. This product enables Chinese students studying abroad to easily pay tuition in home currency (¥CNY). Fortunately, I joined the pre-launch session at Alipay headquarter in Hangzhou, China. In a day of testing, feedback, and improvement workshop, I am immersed in how product management and UX research operates in industry.

Part I: Tour and Talks

With warm greetings, the day starts with a brief tour at Alibaba HQ. The Ant Financial campus is huge to wander around. All stores here supports Face-Payment — You can pay with Alipay facial recognition technology, without taking out your phone or card.

The leaders of design, engineering, and marketing team of this product had each given a talk about what they do at Alibaba. I learned a great deal about how a million-user product is developed from scratch in the real world. The importance of user research was beyond my imagination. Definitely a lot more complex and dedicated than a hackathon project. 😂

Part II: Test and Re-design

The version we saw was already ready-to-ship. After grey testing and user research, we were challenged to improve the product in terms of UX:

If you were to re-design the experience of cross-border tuition payment, what would you do?

The product manager guided us to analyze use scenario, create personna, and see the problem from different perspectives.

After a few hour of brainstorming, I came up with an original feature. Here’s how:

The underlying transaction of Alipay oversea tuition payment is a wire transfer. Unlike Paypal or Interac e-transfer (where all you need is an email address), wire transfer is notorious for the frustrating process of filling out the informations: SWIFT code, branch number, account number, translating names and addresses…It easy to get confused. In China, tuition is almost always paid by parents of a student. But parents usually are not familiar with international wire transfers.

Although the new product of Alipay already collected payment information from schools, the user still have to manually fill out information such as student ID, and also upload required documents to meet regulatory requirements. In the past, student would send the transfer information to parents, and it have been a headache for many Chinese parents to figure out how to fill out the all the forms and files.

Therefore, I suggested a feature that simplifies the process. First, the student fill out the payment information, then, within Alipay app, send a confirmation to parent. The parents only need to confirm and pay. This streamlined the process and eliminated back-and-forth detail checking between student and parent.

Beside this feature, I also came up with some UX/UI improvements for the product. The Alipay product team really liked my ideas, and some of my suggestions were implemented in future iterations of the product. At the end of the day, I was selected the 1ˢᵗ prize for the best feature proposals.

(a summarization of this blog post in Chinese)

“留学缴费” 是支付宝官方于2019年8月新推出的功能。产品上线前，我在蚂蚁金服西溪园区参与到了灰度测试、用户研究和体验改进中。

支付宝留学缴费这一功能是通过 Wire 汇款实现的，这种汇款方式十分繁琐，需要正确填写名称，地址，以及各种代码，编号等等信息。在中国，留学生学费主要是由家长支付，但家长往往不熟悉 Wire 汇款的流程，不清楚如何填写各种信息。尽管支付宝已经预先收集好了各学校收款账户，但仍需要手动填写 ID，上传学费证明、缴费通知等文件。即使学生将各类信息和文件都发给家长，由家长复制填写汇款单，对家长来说仍然不够简便。

我提出了一种解决方案：参考淘宝代付的逻辑，可以让学生本人填写好缴费信息并上传好所需文件，再向家长发起代付请求，家长仅需确认信息并付款即可。同时我也提出了其他一些 UX 细节的建议。我的部分建议在后续的产品迭代中被采纳。