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Multi Currency

At Mighty Networks, I ran the Money & Members squad, handling all projects related to payments and how members join online communities. I developed a 3 year plan on how to overhaul our payment collection system, and give hosts the freedom and flexibility they wanted when it comes to charging members. The first major milestone and largest return on investment was building out multi currency to open us up to an international market.

Product Manager & UX Designer

Managed and led design on a team of 12 software engineers, 2 designers, and 4 QA engineers (Nov 2020 - May 2021)

Product Management
Experience Design
Figma
Vision Definition
Competitive Analysis
Iterative Development
Timeline Creation
Interface Design

About the Product

Mighty Networks allows Hosts to create communities they can call home. However, we currently restrict how they accept members by forcing them to choose one of four privacy settings (public, private, secret, and paid). Each of the four have their own features which are exclusive to it, which causes a lot of confusion for Hosts. Here's a quick overview of what the features are and some of the complaints.

Public

Public communities allow anyone to see what's going on inside, and everyone is able to create an account.

Private

People can find the community but can't see any of the content within. They have to get approval of the Host to join the community and answer any screening questions the Host sets.

Secret

Without an invite link, people won't know the community exists and cannot find it on google or any internal network. Anyone with an invite link can join.

Paid

Nobody can see any posts in the community, but anyone can purchase access to it. Hosts can set up multiple plans people can purchase to access the community with.

How Do Customers Feel

One of our biggest complaints from customers is that they don't feel like they have control over onboarding. A lot of people want to mix and match features from specific privacy settings, and many find that what is offered is missing elements from what they need

Martinus E.

"I feel like if [people] don't see the content I'm posting they won't want to join, but if people can see the content before joining I just get random people joining. When I got a bunch of spammers I had to switch to private which threw off my whole business model."
via Host Interview

Hannah K.

"Once I share a link can other people share it and join?" Yes. "But then how do I have control over who joins?"
Intercom Help Request

Kayla T.

She doesn't want more than 20 people joining a course that's paid, so she sets up her payment plan, and waits for several hours until the 20th person subscribes and then hides the plan so nobody else can join. This takes up a lot of her time and causes problems when she doesn't shut it down quickly enough.
Report from Customer Advocacy Team
The recurring theme throughout the interviews was that Hosts felt too restricted in what they could do with their payment plans. The best way I found to describe it to people was to use the metaphor of building a house. We had essentially told you can build a house with brick walls or glass walls, and depending on which one you choose you'd have to use a particular door and lock with it.
To fix these problems people were having, we'd have to pull apart the blueprint, so that Hosts can mix an match the doors however they want. In the process of pulling apart these settings and providing flexibility, we needed to make sure we expand on what we're offering too so that we can continue to provide users with whatever they needed.
To do this I wrote up a several year plan tackling the different projects we would have to do and in what order to hit the big ticket items the soonest as well as ensure technical feasibility that it could get done. The most requested upgrade to one of these doors has been to support multiple currencies. To get from where our product was to it, it would take several major steps.

Feature 1: Taxes

Every April, there is one day that gets everyone across the country excited. Nobody had complained about this day, not even once. That's right, it's Tax Day! While taxes aren't most people's favorite topic in the world, it's important to properly collect or not collect taxes depending on the country you are operating in and who is purchasing your services. It's important to note, that for this first stage
THE PROBLEM

Mighty Network's had tax collection setup for every business accepting payments. It can be expensive to file taxes for small businesses, and below a certain income they don't need to file in particular countries. However, collecting taxes and not paying them to the government is illegal. So people needed the flexibility in how they charge tax, or opt out of it completely.

We started off with who we wanted to partner with for tax calculation. After narrowing it down to a few potential clients, we landed on Quaderno because we could get a better rate for our clients, and we they were significantly more responsive to help requests. With a simple one click option in settings, they could create an account with Quaderno, or decide to leave taxes turned off.
Once connected, the Hosts would have the ability to decide on how exact they wanted to be in their tax to be calculated and what additional information Quaderno could collect to be exact on the taxes.  In order to properly apply taxes, Quaderno needs two of three things to match, the zip code, the ip address, and the county selected. Without collecting a billing address, there would be a higher likelihood the validation would fail.
Our existing payment collection form also needed an upgrade in order to collect billing addresses and display taxes. We created an accordion style form so that no matter how people have set up their taxes, it all feels the same.

Stage 2: Redesign Pricing

We show the price in many places throughout our product, all of which had to change to be significantly more flexible to accommodate all the new forms the price could take.

1

Longer Prices

Not only did we plan on raising our pricing caps, but other currencies can add up to six intervals on a price. For example, 10,000.00 United States Dollars (USD) is equivalent to 3,363,818,213,713,137.00 Venezuelan Bolívares (VEF). Whatever the design, it needs to be able to accommodate such large prices.

2

Charmless Pricing

We had originally made our pricing options match Apple's pricing requirements for iOS pricing. This requires every price to end in .99. While charm pricing has been shown to make people more likely to purchase, many hosts felt like it came across as squeezing pennies from their members. We needed to provide a way for them to opt out if they wanted it

3

Moving Currency Symbol

The placement of the currency symbol ($, €, ¥, etc.) depends on the language spoken at the location of purchase. And so The price had to reference a location database to determine where the currency symbol should go.

4

Changing Formats

The price also needed to accommodate the correct format, as different countries display prices differently. For example, while USD used commas to denote the thousands place and decimal points for the cents (##,###,###.##) the Euro uses the opposite (##.###.###,##). Our structure had to be flexible enough to accommodate a range of formats.
I developed a new price tile and a global set of rules to determine how we displayed prices to accommodate everything listed above as well as important markers like the subscription renewal rate and an indicator that there are other potential prices.
While this formatting is great for things like plan headers, The price shows up in a plethora of places, but the rules stay the same. Minor adjustments had to be made in each of these stylings to handle growing and shrinking pricing.
Our existing payment collection form also needed an upgrade in order to collect billing addresses and display taxes. We created an accordion style form so that no matter how people have set up their taxes, it all feels the same.

Stage 3: Charge Over $1000

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Stage 4: Handling Android

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Stage 5: Multi Currency MVP

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Stage 6: Multi Currency Final

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The Future

While I can't disclose what projects are coming next, I can say the work we did here was very intentional to make sure we didn't block ourselves from being able to tackle another years world of projects I helped design and lay out a path forward for.

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Before

After

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Image Gallery

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Columns

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Project Name

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Long Page Breakdown

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What's it Called?

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What's it Called?

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What's it Called?

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Long Page Breakdown

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Experience Design

Service Blue Printing, User Flow Creation, Scripted Experiences

Product Managment

Product Realization Documents, Jira, Trello, Product Board

Digital Prototyping

Figma, Web Flow, Adobe Creative Suite, Unity, Final Cut,

Physical Prototyping

Machine Shops, Foam Core, 3D Modeling

User Research

Interviews, Observation, Surveys, Competitive Analysis, A/B Testing

Synthesis

Qualitative and Quantitative, User Journey’s

Sketching

Pen & Paper, Adobe Creative Suite, ProCreate

Storytelling

Presenting, Improv, Videography, Script Writing