How a single icon delights 50% of our users

Originally post in Medium

tl;dr version: this is a story of how impactful a single icon is, if you want to see graphs and stuff, press “back”.

Recently we are building our platform for Doubles, our super human business admin to streamline their routines. One tiny indicator is to show that if the customers has input their credit card numbers. This allows us to charge and to pay on behalf of our customers for services from our partners or goods, such as card scanning service.

I have recognized that there should be a way to indicate that. The position should be very prominent and eye-catching. So I make an icon beside the name of our customers and call it a day.

The original solution.

I then announced that to the Doubles and thought they should be happy now. But as the day went by the engineering team was still being pegged by Doubles if a particular customer had put in their payment method. Each and every time we patiently said there was a tick beside the name and answered yes or no. But the Doubles seems to have trouble remember such.

Suddenly it came to my realization that I have made a fundamental mistake — I made users think. But I am trained as engineer and didn’t think the importance of one tiny icon. So I put it on the issue tracker and procastinated.

As last maybe in the sixth time of Double asking me, I decided that it is enough and I quickly changed the icon to this.

The current solution, Much better, isn’t it?

I deployed it and didn’t think much about it.

Until I saw this,

I didn’t expect changing a single icon could make users delight. In hindsight of course this was common sense, but I am still in awe how little the effort was and how high the impact is. This is a great lesson for me to think again what is impact. Also it is a great example of the importance of Design thinking to make great product. Listening to users is always the key to fill in holes in your common sense.