To deliver Central Banking, Wave needed to migrate its bank connection provider to Plaid. There were 3 areas the Plaid migration would improve.
To deliver on these goals, we had to migrate existing users on our old bank connection provider over to Plaid while ensuring their transactions imported into the same accounts. I collaborated with my engineering team and the Accounting team to understand how accounts were handled from a back-end perspective across Wave.
The word “account” is used many times throughout Wave. It has various meanings dependent on certain contexts. Many of which were unique to Wave's Accounting history and infrastructure. Instead of trying to explain to users how things worked, I decided to guide users to the right place. Our design guidelines identified that we should be contextual, helpful, and transparent. I used these principles when creating the migration flow.
I collaborated with the product manager and the data team for some data analysis and cohorting. I worked with the product manager and engineering to identify groups of users to migrate and segmented them by the bank they had connected, the account types importing transactions, and the account in Wave Accounting. These account states needed to remain after a user was migrated.
Breaking down the migration into steps, outcomes, and user states.
To get a clearer picture of the users journey, I mapped out a user flow for the engineering team to scope the work. This helped anybody to get a picture of what was changing which strengthened alignment.
Migration user flow.
I also worked with the Product Manager, Customer Support, and Content Strategist on communication such as emails and help center content.
This exercise in customer communication allowed us to keep some experience factors in mind for the migration user flow, answering the questions