Chase Pay inside Walmart Pay

What the work had to do

1. 01

   Give people more ways to save

   Chase Ultimate Rewards points, redeemable as a statement credit at a Walmart register — a reason to reach for the app instead of the card.

2. 02

   Keep it convenient

   The saving had to arrive without adding a second wallet to set up or a second thing to think about at the till.

3. 03

   Move adoption and retention

   Not just first-time linking. The measure was whether people kept paying with Walmart Pay after the novelty.

What I owned

The Chase Pay integration end to end, from June 2019 to April 2020 — the entry points, the value proposition wherever it appeared, the linking flow and its redirect out to Chase, the settings surface, and pay-with-points at the register. I was the only designer on it.

The team

Inside Walmart Pay: 1 design manager, 1 user researcher, 1 product manager and 10+ engineers. The researcher ran recruiting and the study script; the design manager ran critique. The design work was mine.

Across the table

5 stakeholders at JPMorgan Chase. Every screen carrying Chase brand, Chase card data or Chase rewards language went through them, and I worked with them on legal review during the design, not after it.

How the work was judged

Walmart Pay adoption and retention, and whether it shipped on both platforms. It launched in the Walmart iOS app on 27 February 2020 and on Android on 4 June 2020.

What the store test found

1. 01

   The benefit was invisible

   It was not evident that Chase Pay would save anyone time. Every participant had a Chase login, but most had never used Chase Pay — so they assumed linking it meant extra work somewhere outside the Walmart Pay setup they were already doing.

2. 02

   Linking all cards read as a risk

   Participants could not tell the difference between adding a regular credit or debit card and linking Chase Pay. Pulling in every card at once felt convenient and alarming at the same time: they worried about spending a card, or rewards, they had not intended to.

1. 01

   Design and recruiting ran in parallel

   Six weeks of design sprints and mockups in Sketch, then a week prototyping in Adobe XD. While that ran, the researcher spent two weeks recruiting participants and a week on pilot testing and the study script — so the prototype and the study were ready in the same fortnight rather than in sequence.

2. 02

   Legal review inside the design, not after it

   I worked with the Chase partners on legal review during the seven weeks. On a two-company integration the rewards language and the data-handling claims are design material — finding out in month three which sentences are allowed means redrawing the screens they sit on.

3. 03

   Tested where the product actually lives

   A week of in-store testing in Dallas: twelve Walmart and Chase customers, 60-minute one-on-one interviews, six on iOS and six on Android. The script deliberately went wider than the feature — their history of shopping at Walmart, and how they already used credit cards and digital payments — before touching the prototype.

1. 01

   Chase Pay gets its own group

   In settings, linked Chase cards sit in a separate group from credit and debit cards, under a line explaining that a secure token authorises payment and the sensitive data never leaves Chase. Participants had not been able to tell the two apart; separating them is what makes "I linked an account" different from "I added a card."

2. 02

   Say where the data actually lives

   The security claim is specific rather than reassuring in general — your sensitive data never leaves Chase, your linked cards stay up to date. The study was clear that perceived security problems kill a payment feature just as dead as real ones.

3. 03

   Points off by default, in both currencies

   The rewards toggle ships Off. Participants had accrued those points carefully and wanted to choose the moment to spend them, and the On/Off label next to the toggle makes the current state readable at a glance. The balance shows as both points and dollars — 1,232 points ($10.56) — because the conversion is not one-to-one and nobody should be doing that arithmetic at a register.

Outcome

+18%

Walmart Pay monthly active users in the six months after launch

34%

Of Chase cardholders setting up Walmart Pay linked Chase Pay

2.1x

Repeat Walmart Pay use among customers who linked Chase Pay

Shipped

27 Feb 2020

Launched in the Walmart iOS app

4 Jun 2020

Launched in the Walmart Android app

2

Platforms, one design, three months apart

Research and process

12

Walmart and Chase customers, 60-minute sessions in-store

7 wks

Iteration, critique and prototyping before the study

5

JPMorgan Chase stakeholders worked with directly

What the study settled, beyond this feature

1. 01

   Security, security, security

   People want their money safely spent, and they read safety off the interface. Real and perceived security problems are a deal-killer at any stage of a payment flow — which means the reassurance is product work, not copy applied at the end.

2. 02

   Another way to pay is not a benefit

   Merely adding a payment option does not move adoption. Customers need a benefit big enough to be worth changing a habit at a register, and saving time and effort is where that starts.

3. 03

   Money, time, effort, security

   Everything the study surfaced, good or bad, came back to one of those four. Monetary incentive is what triggers action; the other three are what stop it.

1. 01

   I let the value proposition assume familiarity

   Every participant had a Chase login and almost none had used Chase Pay. That was knowable before the study — it is a fact about the customer base, not a finding — and the first design still leaned on the Chase brand carrying its own meaning. Naming the actual benefit at every entry point should have been the starting position, not the correction.

2. 02

   I fixed the reassurance, then had to go back for the timing

   The redirect alert made people feel safer, and I took the positive signal at face value for too long. It was only after many iterations that I noticed it never promised the trip to Chase was momentary. Reading the alert against the anxiety it was supposed to answer, rather than against whether people liked it, would have caught that in one pass.

3. 03

   I would have taken the formula to customers in week one

   The store test came after seven weeks of design. A rough version of Chase's ready-made pattern in front of a handful of customers at the start would have surfaced both findings before the screens were drawn, and turned the weeks of iteration into weeks of fixing the right things.