Cards Event Log
Good design is important at Mercury, and that runs deep. At companies with support tools built in-house, it’s not uncommon for them to appear designed by engineers in a rush. Here at Mercury, we have a team dedicated to designing, building, and maintaining internal tools, but folks on other product teams are also able to make time to contribute!
Most of my work is with the Cards team, and this is one of those internal tools projects. Providing customer support for cards often requires getting a full picture of what’s happened with a card:
Why did this transaction decline?
Why is my card frozen?
Why did this transaction go through?
Traditionally, helping folks with these sorts of requests meant asking for engineering support, or digging through logs from partners in the card process. This means latency, issues with access, and a pretty clunky navigation journey for folks trying to help customers on what could be a time-sensitive issue.
To resolve this, I got to collaborate with folks from support and our cards infrastructure team, to understand the universe of things that could happen with a card, as well as what was most useful for support. We wanted to give them full access to a card’s history, but also give them tools to filter out some of the noisier events.
Some of my favorite details
To make it easy to scan, we use a few different key icons to indicate what an event is about generally: ❄️ for freeze events, ✏️ for edit events (like nickname), ✔️ for successful transactions, ⚠️ for unsuccessful transactions, and a few others
To help reduce noise, and make it easier to chunk events by date, we followed a pattern from our customer-facing apps of omitting dates when the event above is from the same day. There was a lot of conversation around what date granularity is most useful, down to discussions of how much years or seconds mattered (not much, as you can see ;-)
There was some opportunity for classic Mercury fun as well—rather than boring “Card created,” we added some more flavorful “<issuer> welcomed <card nickname> to The Universe”
There was a ton of opportunity for typical Mercury cross-team collaboration here, as well as a chance to go deep on some of the more technical aspects of the systems we’re building around. If this kind of work sounds interesting to you, we’re continuing to grow the design team, and there’s plenty of opportunity to go deep on challenging problems with friendly, knowledgeable coworkers. Check out the job posting ›
