How Visa solves complex design challenges

Kerry Hebert, Principal UX Designer for Digital Developed Markets at Visa, makes a living solving complex problems through the power of design.

When she joined Visa in October 2015, Kerry and her team faced a towering design challenge—to reimagine, redesign, and redevelop Visa’s Token Service product. It’s the behind-the-scenes magic that allows consumers to pay securely with their mobile device (think Apple Pay), online (think Visa Checkout), or with the Internet of Things (think wearables like Fit Pay).

Kerry knew this challenge would require a different design process and the right collaborative design tools. Already a strong user of Sketch and InVision Enterprise, Kerry proposed the new workflow to her team.

“I was being asked to come in and achieve a very complex thing,” Kerry said. “If I had Sketch and InVision, I knew we would be able to do what we needed to do.”

Creating shared vision and understanding of user-centric design
Kerry’s team works across the globe—a product owner in Austin, architect in Foster City, designers in San Francisco, and development teams in Bangalore and Singapore.

Before anyone on the team wrote a single line of code, Kerry and other project leaders visited their brand-new development team in Bangalore to create a shared team vision for the product revamp.

“I think some designers don’t give their developers enough credit in terms of being part of early conversations,” Kerry said. “You design these beautiful things and toss them over the fence and cross your fingers. That’s not the way I want to work.”

Kerry’s team started with an InVision Board—”Boards are an amazing way to throw things together, get feedback, and get a vision together”—and Kerry quickly evolved the team’s ideas into an InVision prototype before going to Bangalore.

“I went there with a fairly comprehensive InVision prototype,” Kerry said. “I was able to share the vision with the entire team. It was perfect to be able to start the conversation that goes, ‘This is what we want to do. Does this make sense, and if yes, can you build it?’”

Helping the entire global product design team understand where they fit into the complicated product revamp process—and how the designed solutions came from user feedback—was essential to success.

“I think some designers don’t give their developers enough credit in terms of being part of early conversations. You design these beautiful things and toss them over the fence and cross your fingers. That’s not the way I want to work.” –Kerry Hebert, Principal UX Designer, Digital Developed Markets, Visa

Transforming the designer-developer relationship

Using InVision Enterprise, designers, developers, product managers, and other stakeholders at Visa used comments inside InVision to track changes and provide feedback. It was a new, efficient way to work.

“The classic product design process ends up with a lot of inefficiencies… [InVision Enterprise] became a source of truth for product, development, QA—everyone,” said Kerry. “That’s really powerful. It made us more efficient by giving people the information they needed, when they needed it, even during a very complicated process.”

For design-to-development handoffs, the Visa team started with several other handoff-specific tools, but switched to InVision’s Inspect feature upon release.

Other handoff-specific tools work through share links, Kerry explained, which immediately create a separate item to worry about and track. “If you’re looking to be able to rely on a single source and not have to deal with invalid links, Inspect solves that problem.”

The right design platform for the job at hand

Beyond the revamp of Visa’s token enrollment tool, Kerry believes the adoption of InVision gives her team the right platform for approaching all future design challenges.

When Kerry first tested out Sketch and InVision together several years ago, she quickly realized the powerful change she could make in her workflow.

“I have not fired up Photoshop since that day,” Kerry said. “I thought, ‘They’ve finally created tools that work the way my brain works.’ Sketch and InVision are wired the way I’m wired as a creative professional, and the seamlessness between them is incredibly powerful.”

Kerry’s own experience adopting Sketch and InVision helps her guide her Visa team to spread design practices across the product design organizations.

“InVision gives us a tool to not only stress-test the design, but improve it. It’s a totally different ballgame from static mockups—I can see the energy and the momentum when I give product owners something tangible,” Kerry said. “It becomes a collaborative experience between designers and developers. It’s like creating an entire army of UX designers without even trying.”

“I thought, ‘They’ve finally created tools that work the way my brain works.’ Sketch and InVision are wired the way I’m wired as a creative professional, and the seamlessness between them is incredibly powerful.” –Kerry Hebert, Principal UX Designer, Digital Developed Markets, Visa

The ROI of designing with InVision Enterprise

For Kerry, it’s impossible to understate the role InVision Enterprise played in revamping Visa’s token enrollment product.

“When I started, we did not have Sketch. We did not have InVision,” she said. “We went from no one using it to the entire product design organization.”

The advantages of a platform designed for user-centric digital product design speak for themselves, Kerry said. InVision Enterprise provides an easier, faster way of doing what product designers want to do—solve problems through design.

“If everyone in your company is thinking about the user, you can’t help but create great products. There’s a tangible ROI attached to approaching design this way.”