Contracted by Yaga to design the user interface for their payment processing system, I conducted rapid ethnographic research and used an engineering prototype as a starting point. Initially, work was to be limited to skinning the prototype's interface. As I began to explore the prototype, however, it became clear that common tasks were difficult to perform, and information grouping and hierarchy had not been defined. I worked with Yaga's in-house engineering and product marketing staff to simplify the interaction model and define the site's information architecture.

Based on a quick ethnographic study, I identified the target user as having a college education and a career background in accounting. I felt that the user's higher level of education allowed me to draw on patterns present in the accounting world. I explored interfaces of common accounting and business software to learn more about how a typical user would input data and run reports. As a result, I added controls that allowed a user to expand or collapse groups of information, and streamlined the definition of Product SKUs so that product attributes and special offers could be easily associated with items being sold by a merchant.

An interaction design specification, along with an interactive prototype, was delivered to Yaga engineers. The final product was the marriage of my prototype to Yaga's back-end systems.