AXS PAYMENTS
MERCHANT PORTAL
Redesigning the AXS Merchant Experience
CLIENT: AXS Pte Ltd
ROLES: UI Design, UX Research
DURATION: 1 month
INFO
As part of my UX Design capstone at General Assembly, I collaborated with two teammates to tackle a real-world design brief from AXS, Singapore’s leading payment solutions provider.
METRICS
After iteration, the portal achieved an overall 60% improvement in task efficiency, supported by smoother navigation and more intuitive workflows. New pages including payment methods and integrations, were also positively received for clarity and ease of use.
ABOUT AXS MERCHANT PORTAL
The AXS Merchant Portal helps merchants monitor, manage, and reconcile payments made through AXS payment channels, providing visibility, accuracy, and convenience for accounting and business operations.
DESIGN AND RESEARCH PROCESS
Problem Discovery
Analysed competitors, reviewed existing features, and tested with users to reveal gaps and pain points.
Define
Synthesise research insights and user needs. Create problem statement & “How Might We” statements to frame opportunities.
Prototype
Ideate and create prototype based on research outcomes and user testing/interview.
Ideate
Leveraged cross-functional perspectives from AXS to reveal gaps and opportunities in the customer journey.
Iterate
Built on design workshop learnings to collaboratively shape ideas.
Deliver
Presented final ideas to AXS leaders and C-suite.
CHALLENGES
Our challenge was to uncover pain points, address friction in user flows, and propose improvements that balance user needs with business objectives, ultimately enhancing usability and redefining the AXS merchant experience issues erode confidence.
SOLUTION
Unifying key operations such as ordering, payments, refunds, loyalty, and accounting to streamline processes, reduce friction, and help merchants scale their business. By extending beyond transactions into daily business management, the portal evolves into a comprehensive operational hub for merchants.
COMMON PAIN POINTS
We interview 10 merchants across retail, F&B, and B2B, from both online and offline channels. By including a mix of AXS and non-AXS merchants, we gained a broader perspective to understand their daily workflows, use cases, and struggles. Evaluation metrics included task completion rate, time on task, and ease of use.
Efficiency gaps Merchants struggle with reconciliation, refunds, and reporting. They shares that reports are limited and sometimes confusing. Refund process is cumbersome and unintuitive. Reports lack useful info and identifiers.
Need for integrations
Merchants want seamless connection to existing tools and processes.
Strategic features
Loyalty programs and higher level dashboards are seen as great additions.
Trust vs. Experience gap
Merchants choose AXS for credibility but usability issues erode confidence.
PRODUCT STRATEGY AND USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN WORKSHOP
To better understand how merchants interact with AXS across their journey, I facilitate collaborative workshop with stakeholders from Product, Sales, Engineering, Marketing and more. Together, we mapped the end-to-end merchant experience — from onboarding to checkout — to uncover where friction occurs and where new value could be created. This exercise revealed key gaps in transparency and efficiency within the current portal and helped shape a clearer direction for AXS’s next-generation product and UX strategy.
GROUP DISCUSSION Hands-on session where mixed teams collaborated using post-its to map ideas, build alignment, and surface key pain points.
SHARING Teams exchanged insights and feedback, uncovering new perspectives through open discussion and cross-team understanding.
COLLABORATIVE FEATURE EVALUATION Guided the group to evaluate each feature’s feasibility and impact.
PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION
The workshop not only generated ideas and strategies, but also deepened our understanding of recurring user pain points. Merchants lack an integrated, end-to-end system that connects key operations such as ordering, payments, refunds, loyalty, and accounting, which makes it difficult to run efficiently and scale. Combined with our research insights, these findings helped us frame two How Might We (HMW) questions:
How might we enable merchants to simplify backend operations and reduce manual effort?
How might we equip merchants with tools and insights that help them grow their business?
PROTOTYPE WALKTHROUGH
With users' pain point through research and sharings from the workshop in mind, we translated our insights into high-fidelity prototypes. Each solution was designed to reduce friction, aid merchant to run their business efficiently and aim to allow the whole portal experience to feel effortless, intuitive, and reliable.
DASHBOARD
BEFORE
• Merchants need a clearer monthly summary of fees and costs.
• Half of the merchants want an at-a-glance view of money in, pending and cash-out status.
• The current system lacks a consolidated dashboard for settlements and refunds.
AFTER
• Provide detailed sales insights (gross/net sales, orders and average value).
• Improve graph clarity with clear legends and sales/refund overview.
• Introduce a subscription tier for advanced insights after a free period as a potential business strategy.
TRANSACTION
BEFORE
• 90% of merchants cited that reconciliation are a “painful” process
• Merchants struggled to locate the refund button, which was buried across three pages.
• Merchants depended on receipts to confirm transactions and maintain records.
AFTER
• Enhance visibility of settlement status.
• Link transactions and settlements to simplify reconciliation.
• Rearrange refund button for visibility.
• Auto invoice generation.
• Time taken reduced by half for refund task.
SETTLEMENT
BEFORE
• Report downloads and reconciliation are tedious, limited to 10 reports within a 24-hour window.
• Merchants want a quick high-level view of incoming funds.
AFTER
• Remove 24-hour download limit; allow bulk report downloads.
• Provide available, incoming and outgoing fund overview.
• Auto generated report for the day sent to email.
PLUGIN INTEGRATION PAGE (Proposed New Page)
INSIGHTS • Disconnected systems require merchants to reconcile data manually, leading to inefficiency and scalability issues.
• Reconciling payments remains a key pain point.
ITERATED
• Integrate existing accounts with softwares that merchants use.
• Call to action to sign up for software, calls for B2B partnerships.
PAYMENT METHODS PAGE (Proposed New Page)
INSIGHTS • Merchants want flexibility to choose payment methods based on fees, usability, and customer needs.
• With more payment methods available, customers especially tourists now look for a wider range of options.
AFTER • Merchant have control over types of payment methods available online vs offline channels.
BILL PAYMENT PAGE (Proposed New Page)
• Enable merchants to pay bills directly in the portal to streamline operations.
• Expanding the portal to include bill management would increase its strategic value, positioning it as a more comprehensive operational hub for merchants.
REFLECTION AND TAKEAWAYS
• Shared understanding drives better solutions
Co-creation discussion helped align Product, Sales, Engineering, and UX around real merchant pain points, confirmation states, and transparent error handling are essential in reducing anxiety during payment.
• Listening as a design skill
The workshop reinforced the importance of active listening — insights emerged from discussions across teams.