AXS
M-STATION
Simplifying your bill payments
Founded in 2000, AXS is Singapore’s leading payment solutions provider, offering convenient digital services for everyday transactions. To stay ahead of evolving user expectations, AXS engaged my team to redesign its app with a more seamless, user-friendly, and engaging experience.
MY ROLE
User Research Lead, Ideation Lead
DURATION
3 weeks
“
The team demonstrated professionalism, creativity, and user-centered thinking. Through extensive user research, including interviews, usability testing, and card sorting, they uncovered key pain points and opportunities for improvement. Their findings, articulated through personas, journey maps, and problem statements, laid
a strong foundation for their design proposals.”
– Laverne Soh, Chief Strategy Officer, AXS
The Challenge
AXS had not conducted usability testing for more than a decade, during which user expectations and mobile standards had evolved significantly. As a result, both apps encountered usability challenges and growing competition from digital banks and fintech platforms.
Our objective was to uncover key pain points, translate these findings into user-centered improvements that aligned with business goals, and create a clear redesign roadmap with a primary focus on M-Station.
Our Process
We had only 3 weeks to cover 2 apps, so we worked in iterative loops, moving between research, ideation, and synthesis, and co-created solutions with AXS stakeholders along the way.
Discover
Secondary research, User Interviews, Content Audit, Usability Tests revealed friction in navigation, account setup, and feature awareness.
Storytelling
Conducted a Design Studio
(M-Station) &
Feature Prioritization workshop
with 20+ stakeholders.
Define
Turned complex research findings into actionable personas, journey maps, and How Might We statements to guide design strategy.
Deliver
Design a high-fidelity prototypes to showcase improved flows; usability testing planned as the next step.
Deep Research,
Usability testings & User interviews
We kicked off by analyzing existing research and performing a content audit to understand M-Station’s core flows and uncover usability issues. To validate our hypotheses, we carried out interviews and usability tests with 15 participants, a mix of existing and new users aged 25–45. The insights below highlight the our affinity maps and our key findings.
Affinity Mapping
We organized our user interview findings into categories to uncover key patterns and
pain points. This helped us focus on the most critical issues within the client’s timeline and ensure our solutions stayed effective.
With that, we derived our
key insights below.
Low
Awareness
73% of users unclear about what the app offers beyond payment of bills and fines.
“My Favourites” is hard to discover
73% used it for recurring payments, but most found it only by accident and adapted through it for existing users.
Passcode is confusing
Many did not know the passcode is device-specific. 3 existing users lost data when switching phones without warning.
Reminders would
be helpful
33% wanted reminders
for bill payments and they were unaware the feature exists.
Workshops
Led a co-creation workshop with 15 - 20 cross-functional participants, including UX designers,
product managers, and engineers, to uncover key user challenges and opportunities for improving the AXS M-Station billing experience.
The session resulted in two strategic design directions, which shaped the product’s next iteration. The synthesized insights and proposed concepts were later presented to the CEO, helping secure alignment and approval for further development.
Discovering the Problem Statements
By combining workshops, usability testing, and secondary research, we traced user frustrations back to their root causes and reframed them into a clear problem statement that guided our design direction.
Features Are
Hard to Find
The app is easy to use, but many useful features are hidden, so users don’t know they exist.
Users Learn
by Accident
Most of the features are understandable only for current users. There is a lot of guess and check and lack of transparency
Passcode Is Confusing
Users don’t know why they need a passcode. They think it’s just for login, not to save their info.
No Personal Touch
Users want reminders and favourites to be managed based on their preferences and not an automatic function
Ideation
To speed up the process, I created
a mid-fidelity layout for the user interface team to further develop. Due to time constraints, this helped them prioritize what was most important based on insights from usability testing, research, and design workshops.
Key Solutions
For our solutions, we aim to emphasize the key aspects of the user experience by making the purpose of the passcode more understandable during the sign-up process, allowing users to customize their tabs according to their needs, and improving reminders so that users can easily track their payments.
Our goal is for users to be fully aware of these features, not just to come across them by chance, but to truly understand and use them effectively to get the most out of the app.
Sign Up
Before
AXS login did not clearly explain the purpose of the passcode for security, and users often forgot whether they had signed up due to the overly quick setup process.
After
Users now understand the reason for setting up a passcode and have more login options
like passcodes, Touch ID, and Face ID
— for improved security and visibility.
Homepage
Before
Based on our user interview insights, many users missed the search button and preferred tapping on the categories instead. They also wondered why Favourites appeared larger and often ignored the other tabs.
After
Users can now customise the tabs based on their preferences and view an overview of their spending or recent transactions directly on the home screen, making it more useful and easier to navigate.
Saved Feature
Before
Accessing Favourites requires a passcode. Successful payments are automatically reflected in Favourites, but there is no user personalisation available.
After
Favourites have been renamed “Saved” because users can now do more than just save their bills. They can also save their most-used organisations, pay bills, and create reminders all in one place.
Reminders
Before
Reminders required extra steps and clicks, with each process needing a passcode, making users feel it was a hassle rather than a convenience.
After
Users can now easily see which reminders they have switched on, either as a list or in a calendar view. They can also sort them according to their preferences and edit the next reminder with accuracy.
Overall Solutions
& Next Steps
Due to time constraints, the final round of usability testing was handed over to the AXS team for further evaluation. Therefore, our next step is to conduct a usability test or even an A/B test to determine which user interface works better for both existing and new users. This will help us understand whether existing users are more comfortable sticking to their usual routines or if they are open to change, since sometimes users prefer the harder, familiar way, and learning new steps can create additional obstacles.
Overall, I have learned many things during this project, but one key takeaway is the importance of teamwork and communication. Many times, I stepped outside of my role to assist others, for example by helping design the layout for the user interface and suggesting which designs might work better based on my background in graphic design.
