Empowering Pros Through a More Transparent Payments Experience
Redesigning the Angi Services app to bring visibility, clarity, and proactive support.
Angi is a publicly traded on-demand home services company. Maybe you’ve seen their ads. My agency MojoTech, was brought on to aid the integration of products from the newly acquired Handy and HomeAdvisor.
For over a year, I led product design for the five delivery teams responsible for Angi Services for Pros (formerly Handy for Pros), the app that 250,000 service providers use to claim and complete jobs.
Early in the engagement, the product director asked the Angi Services design team (ie: me) to audit the app’s current user experience. There was significant team turnover during the acquisition of Handy, so we had a clear need to set a new baseline for how we understood the Pro experience.
Tapping into organizational knowledge.
To start, I met with our operations partners, business category managers, and other teams to document known problems that we didn’t need new research to point out. I then reached out to the true keepers of user insights: the customer experience team. They provided their top customer complaints and valuable anecdotes that brought the data to life. Finally I examined our app reviews and existing qualitative user research to understand how Pro’s felt about working with us—and what I found was rough.
Listening to what Pros had been telling us.
The Pro experience under Handy had become at best neglected, at worst punitive and extractive. Handy used financial penalties to enforce policies, but didn’t empower Pros to provide the quality of service expected by Customers, Handy, and Pros themselves. Unsurprisingly, Handy’s approach to their Pros resulted in poor user sentiment, a nearly 20% churn rate, and a high marketing cost to acquire new users.
While there were many issues to address, I worked with product and engineering leads to identify which pain points Product could address independently versus those which required wider organizational alignment.
The largest single theme that fell within Product’s primary responsibility was the lack of clarity, visibility, and support for payments.
We found that:
- People weren’t paid the amount they were expecting.
- People didn’t know when they were getting paid.
- Pay periods and adjustments made total earnings unclear.
- Late and canceled job fees often canceled out Pro earnings and were a huge turn-off.
The business case for solving these problems was strong. User research showed that 14% of Pros who left the platform did so because of payment visibility or tooling issues. Our team estimated that replacing those users, plus the customer support costs for payment related issues was costing Angi $3.7 million a year.
Based on these costs I worked with my product manager and set three key metrics to benchmark the success of our work:
- Reduce payment-related CX inquiries.
- Reduce Pro churn.
- Reduce Pro acquisition cost.
I presented findings to our leads and directors, where we pulled out the trusty impact matrix to find high impact, low effort problems to solve first for the upcoming quarter. We prioritized a number of these problems to address immediately which would give time to design a comprehensive solution, while providing a business case to continue with the larger redesign.
Addressing the problems.
In the end here’s how we addressed the key payments issues we found:
1. People weren’t paid the amount they were expecting.
The payment model operated on weekly pay periods, with completed jobs listed within their respective period. However, users had the option to cash out mid-way through a pay period, and fees could be applied and job earnings adjusted even after the pay period had concluded. This commonly resulted in displayed earnings total not adding up to the eventual deposit a Pro received.
Our solution simplified the payment process by displaying individual transactions in a single list, with the total mirroring a Pro’s current balance, rather than the pay period total. We got rid of the whole concept of pay periods replacing it with a once-a-week automatic deposit, and providing weekly summaries to help users break down their earnings. We also added a comprehensive list of all earnings, bonuses, fees and adjustments associated with a job to the job detail view, regardless of when they were issued.
2. People didn’t know when they were getting paid.
Many Pros said they were uncertain about when their earnings would be deposited into their accounts. While the app showed a payment status when a Pro cashed out, it offered little information on the estimated deposit time, even Angi had that information available.
As a solution, we introduced a payment details view that offers comprehensive information on payment status, amount, and history. This feature also provides estimates on when payments will be deposited into Pros’ accounts and presents these estimates at the time of cashing out, along with a complete payment history.
3. Pay periods and earning adjustments made total earnings unclear.
Angi paid Pros immediately after the job, so when there was “no-show” or cancellation dispute from the customer, a Pro could cash out before they were notified that the customer complained and they shouldn’t have been paid for a job. This triggered a “earning reversal” adjustment for the amount of the job. Only 30% of earning reversals happened on the same day as the job, so many were listed in a different pay period making for an unpleasant surprise days later that was hard to track back to the specific job.
To address this, we first created a separate section to clearly list all fees and adjustments and updated the fee listing to show the date of the original job. Our goal was to avoid confusion when fees and adjustments were charged later. We then updated the job detail view to clearly link fees/reversals with their associated job, and made sure each fee and adjustment had a clear description of the policy.
4. Late and canceled job fees often canceled out Pro earnings
Pros disliked a penalty model based on fees. Obviously. Who would? Taking away earnings or deducting fees out of their future job earnings is not a great way to create a motivated workforce. Around half of all Pros who left the platform did so after a fee. Additionally, many fee related complaints simply came down to the fact that Pros didn’t even know why they were fined, or how to resolve a fee that was incorrectly charged. Uggg.
While the product team couldn’t change business policies ourselves — although we did advocate for other models of enforcing behavior — we could control how users experience those fees. We added alerts on the main payments view notifying Pros know when they were charged a fee. Updated descriptions of fees provided a way to access and understand fee policies, and we made it easy to contact customer support to resolve incorrect fees.
Setting our teams up for success.
We conducted a design usability study to gather user feedback on our designs, recruiting users who had experienced issues with their payments, in order to validate that the improvements were effective.
We documented the designs and requirements, crafting a North Star vision for a solution that aimed to address the identified issues. Ultimately, we created a prioritized roadmap to incrementally deliver value to users, while aligning with the product team’s capacity for delivery.
While I’d love to be able to conclude showing how we reduced CX inquiries, Pro churn, and acquisition cost, MojoTech’s engagement with Angi ended before I could see the work through to implementation. What I can say is the initiative received positive user feedback, praise from product leadership, and as of this writing is currently in active development.
More information, including process work, is available on request.
