The challenge

Plastiq let people pay bills by credit card even when a recipient did not accept cards. The service was useful for small-business owners, renters, and anyone managing cash flow, but entering a payee and payment details on the web created friction at the moment people wanted speed.

The company wanted its first native mobile product to make paying any bill feel as familiar and immediate as taking a photo.

My contribution

I designed and prototyped the iOS experience from research through launch, working with IDEO’s Digital Shop and a two-person external development team. Interviews with customers revealed that the paper statement itself already contained most of the information the product needed, and that the phone camera could become the shortest path into payment.

I shaped the experience around three connected moves:

• Designed a camera-first entry point that scanned a bill instead of beginning with a form.
• Designed OCR review and correction flows so customers could confirm payee and payment details before submission.
• Created a human fallback for scans the software could not resolve, preserving the simple camera-first experience across edge cases.
• Built lightweight onboarding and repeat-payment flows that made the product useful beyond the first scan.

We designed at implementation fidelity, testing the complete interaction while engineering progressed in parallel. That close collaboration let a small team resolve edge cases quickly and move from direction to a production-ready native app in roughly eight weeks within the broader January-to-April program.

The impact

Plastiq launched the app on April 21, 2016. Apple featured it in New Apps We Love within days, and TechCrunch described the central proposition plainly: pay any bill by snapping a photo.

The project gave Plastiq’s existing customer base native mobile access and established a simpler expression of a complicated payments service. Rather than asking users to understand the infrastructure behind the transaction, the product began with an object they already had, used a behavior they already knew, and reduced bill payment to a short, reviewable flow.