Transaction Monitoring Dashboard
Senior Product Designer
2022
Background
"Do you offer fraud prevention tools?"
This was a frequently asked question by both current and prospective customers of Marqeta.
Payment fraud was a real concern for Marqeta's customers as undetected fraud led to large financial losses. At the time of this project, a report from McKinsey found that 82% of companies had been victims of card fraud and worldwide losses were projected to be around $39 billion by 2027.
As a card issuing company, Marqeta offered little to no fraud prevention tools. This gap resulted in lost deals and unfulfilled customers highlighting the need to develop tools quickly.
The following dashboard was designed to give risk operations teams clearer insights into their data, enabling them to make more informed decisions. As the lead designer on this project, I worked with a PM, a team of engineers, and data scientists to ensure the successful launch for this tool.
👥 Team
I worked in a cross-functional squad, with 1 PM, 2 front-end engineers, and 1 data scientist.
💼 Role
I was the sole designer on this project and was responsible for end-to-end design from user research to handoff.
Problem
Interpreting data was difficult
At the time, risk analysts of Marqeta’s customers were using a third-party rules management service within the Marqeta Dashboard to create rules that flagged and declined suspicious transactions.
However, the results of these declined transactions were only available in raw data reports, making it challenging to interpret the results. Without clear visibility, it was difficult to determine whether fraud rules were effectively targeting the right types of transactions, as declining too many legitimate ones harmed the cardholder experience and reduced revenue from interchange fees.
Goals
Providing analysts with insights to make more informed adjustments
After conducting user interviews with risk analysts from five different teams, my PM and I gathered enough insights to develop a hypothesis for our solution.
We believed that providing a dashboard with clear, actionable insights would equip users with the knowledge needed to make more informed adjustments to their rules. By providing clearer insights into how their rules were performing, we believed that analysts would feel more empowered to confidently determine when and how to adjust their rules.
Explorations
Finding common ground and alignment
As I started designing the page layout, I considered trade-offs between various design options and reviewed them with a diverse range of stakeholders, including analysts, data scientists, and engineers. Since I wasn't an expert in data analysis, I leaned on SMEs' expertise to guide a lot of my decisions.
Although feedback from different groups conflicted at times, I was still able to find common ground by aligning on key metrics and visualizations to include. I worked closely with my PM to prioritize data that would be most useful and impactful for all user types.
My primary goal was to present data efficiently, while maintaining a balance between providing critical information and avoiding content overload that could lead to excessive scrolling.
Final Designs
Understanding data at a glance
Since this was an MVP dashboard, our goal was to keep this initial release lean and lightweight. We looked to launch quickly and provide risk teams with early access for feedback, which would allow us to iterate and expand based on their input.
Using data visualizations allowed analysts to quickly spot patterns, avoiding the need to manually sift through raw data. The column chart presents a combo view, showing both the count and rate of declines triggered by custom rules and those flagged by the ML risk scoring model.
We focused on keeping the visualizations simple and intuitive to enhance clarity and ease of understanding.
Impact
Delivering value quickly to customers
The Transaction Monitoring Dashboard was a key component of the RiskControl product suite that was launched in Q2 2022. It quickly became a valuable tool for customers and helped them understand their data better, while providing them with greater confidence in their decision-making process.
Takeaways
Simple solutions can be effective
During early explorations, we experimented with variations that included more data and metrics on the page. However, after multiple feedback sessions and iterations, the simplest design consistently received the most positive feedback. This experience reinforced the value of simplicity and served as a reminder that straightforward solutions shouldn't be overlooked.
Leveraging resources where you can for feedback
A challenge I faced at times in this project was coordinating customer calls for design feedback—due to busy schedules, it was often difficult to find suitable times for discussions. Additionally, since this was considered as a lighter project, many reviews only required brief feedback and didn’t justify long calls with customers.
To address this, I frequently consulted with internal risk analysts at Marqeta for feedback through quick Slack huddles and messages. Building a close rapport with them made it easy to reach out regularly and resulted in more candid feedback.
Through this experience, I’ve come to appreciate the importance in building strong relationships across teams and taking in feedback from all different types of users.