Guiding global payments: Improving accuracy with a country-first flow

Product Design

User Research

Product Design

User Research

As part of Flywire’s acquisition of a company offering the “Pay Any School” feature, the platform expanded beyond partnered institutions to allow payments to any school with publicly available bank details. While this broadened accessibility, it created significant UX challenges. My role was to lead the redesign of the payment initiation flow to improve accuracy, reduce errors, and streamline the user experience at scale.

, all aligned with the latest design system.

Final version of the new UI with the country dropdown as the first step in the payment flow.

Challenge

The expanded school list introduced several issues:

An overwhelming dropdown of institutions, many with identical names across countries.
Increased user confusion and frustration during selection.
A spike in customer support cases due to incorrect school selection and misdirected payments.

The core challenge: help students confidently select the right institution while ensuring the solution could perform reliably across devices, regions, and connectivity levels.

Challenge

The expanded school list introduced several issues:

An overwhelming dropdown of institutions, many with identical names across countries.
Increased user confusion and frustration during selection.
A spike in customer support cases due to incorrect school selection and misdirected payments.

The core challenge: help students confidently select the right institution while ensuring the solution could perform reliably across devices, regions, and connectivity levels.

Early version of pay.flywire.com with institution selection as the initial field in the flow.

Early version of pay.flywire.com with institution selection as the initial field in the flow.

Approach & execution

To reduce friction and errors, I introduced a Country Selector as the first step in the flow, narrowing the list of institutions before users made a choice.

Key Design Enhancements

Preloaded the top four most-used countries at the top of the dropdown, informed by analytics from pay.flywire.com
Applied progressive disclosure, keeping the institution dropdown disabled until a country was selected to guide users step by step.

Experimentation

Ran an A/B test comparing two variations:
1. Institution dropdown only appeared after a country was selected
1. Institution dropdown was visible but disabled until a country was selected
Monitored performance metrics and user behavior to evaluate usability and clarity.

A collection of digital assets, including Open Graph images for various page types, email headers, and online ads.

Comparison of disabled vs. hidden field interactions tested in the A/B experiment.

Outcome & impact

The A/B test results were inconclusive, but qualitative feedback and performance indicators favored the disabled dropdown design.

This approach:

Reduced dropdown load time.
Minimized incorrect selections.
Lowered customer support tickets related to misrouted payments.

Beyond immediate impact, this redesign set a new standard for Flywire’s multi-step payment initiation flows, opening the door for possible future segmentation by institution type, payment method, and other filters to further streamline and personalize the global payment experience.