Neighborly Pay

Neighborly Pay is an online payment portal that allows customers to view and manage current and past invoices and make payments across 19 different brands.

My Role: I led the end-to-end design of a universal payment portal for Neighborly’s core brands, enabling users to sign in, track invoices, and complete payments.

Goals: The business goal was to boost revenue for owners by improving payment collection. The user goal was to offer a seamless, intuitive way to pay bills and access invoices under one payment site.

We interviewed customers and franchise owners to uncover pain points in the payment process. Key findings included:

• Annoyance with signing into different portals (Neighborly has 19 brands).
• Owners who manage multiple properties often have difficulty locating invoices tied to a specific property.
• Customers found it frustrating to review past invoices.
• Making multiple transactions is a tedious process.

We used these insights to create personas, journey maps to visualize friction points and customer sentiments, providing a clearer picture of their past experiences with our payment process.

To redesign and replace the old payment portal with the new Neighborly Pay platform that could significantly improve the home service payment experience.

Once we had enough data, I experimented with different design variations to determine the most efficient way for users to make a payment and view their payment.

Stakeholder Feedback:

After I presented these wireframes to my stakeholders I learned we could lower the amount of user clicks by combining the current and past invoices onto a single page. Reduce the amount of columns within the tables and prioritize the content that was most important to cut down the amount of horizontal scrolling to streamline the experience.

We ran two unmoderated tests with 20+ participants on Userlytics.com, aiming for at least 80% task success. Feedback led to major improvements in navigation, including restructuring the information architecture and reducing payment steps from eight to four by consolidating pages and streamlining the flow.

"The payment page layout is straightforward and easy to understand, with clear options for paying invoices and viewing payment history."

Following testing, we synthesized insights as a team and identified several usability issues:

• The property selector dropdown was overlooked or unclear to many users.

• Some users found the interface too plain and lacking visual appeal.

• The left navigation panel felt unnecessary and took up valuable space.

• Users wanted more invoice detail to build trust and confidence.

These insights directly informed design refinements and guided the next phase of testing.

We conducted an unmoderated A/B test with 30 participants via Userlytics.com to compare two homepage designs, focusing on usability and functionality through qualitative feedback.

Variant A: Insights

• Felt cluttered, with tight white space in the table causing potential information loss.

• Dropdown property selector was confusing; users suggested buttons instead.

• Pagination showing total invoices was well-received.

Variant B: Insights

• Preferred this version for its clean, modern, and organized layout.

• Easier to navigate and complete tasks.

• Button-based property selection was more intuitive.

• Felt more secure for transactions, though some found the colors slightly distracting.

Recommendations & Next Steps

• Adopt Variant B for the Neighborly Pay homepage due to its clarity and modern design.

• Refine elements to maintain some of Variant A’s simplicity.

• Conduct further usability testing to validate improvements.

• Users can now look at all 19 Neighborly brand services in a single payment site with just one account.
• Multiple property owners can now check all their properties easily and quickly.
• Users no longer have to remember past invoices from months or years ago.

Key Learnings

After testing the updated Neighborly Pay portal, 80% of first-time users reported that it was easy to use and felt confident making payments.

Next Steps

The redesign received strong support from Product and Senior Leadership, and was approved for development. It is currently in production and set to launch later this year.