Transact
Integrated Payment Solutions Helping Students Manage Finances
Narrative helps revitalize Transact’s brand identity through multiple digital touch points.
In March 2019 Blackboard announced that Transact was acquired by Reverence Capital Partners, and would become an independent company. Transact’s extensive portfolio of integrated solutions enables institutions to provide a frictionless experience across campus including campus access, mobile credentials, stored value and point-of-sale solutions, security management, attendance automation, events authorization, electronic tuition payments, and bookstore management. As a market leader in campus engagement and payments solutions and the pioneer of mobile credentials, Transact was well positioned to grow and create value for it’s customers as a standalone entity.
Following this announcement, Transact kicked off a visual language development initiative. Transact's products had adopted the design language and brand aesthetic of Blackboard, and now—without a unifying parent company—there was a design system void. As a result, Transact's products became generic and lacked a core identity. Transact and Narrative dove in to solve the issue, and developed a design system and guidelines that would support the creation of consistent and cohesive experiences for users across the entire product suite. With this engagement, Transact renewed its commitment to a strong brand identity that accurately reflects their values to provide a positive user experience for their customers.
Challenge
Multiple and disparate products that span the holistic campus experience
Students use a variety of products to manage day-to-day campus expenses. Transact aspires to consolidate and simplify these processes and allows users to manage a variety of accounts in a single responsive, platform-based environment.
Business Value
An opportunity to make products more efficient and user-friendly
Transact provides a suite of integrated expense management tools that allow universities to create more efficient financial management processes for students using campus-related services.
User Value
Empowering students to seamlessly navigate their college campus
Students have a centralized, familiar and responsive environment that provides the ability to track and manage school-related expenses—everything from tuition payments to meal planning and class fees.
The magic collaboration between marketing and product teams
The collaboration between marketing and the product teams at Transact created a brand and creative strategy through introspection of the products and services Transact offers and the core demographic to whom they serve. The opportunity for Design and Marketing teams to collaborate together to create more meaningful experiences is often overlooked in traditional top down approaches.
The team had the advantage of starting with the fundamental aspects of design to inform the design refresh. A series of workshops were conducted and preliminary mood boards captured and cataloged inspiration that guided the style and aesthetics of the project to remain true to Transact’s brand goals and expectations.
The new design has a remarkable impact on making our products easily understandable, and it emphasizes the significant transformation required for achieving simplicity.
Taran Lent
SVP Product and Technology
A focused strategy to cover Transact’s vast product space
The design process focused on identifying a series of Transact products that offered a wide range of user experiences, design conflicts, and ambiguity around the design language.
After the design audit and design application, the team created a collection of reusable front end components that leveraged the power of material UI. These components came together into core archetype screens to establish the foundation for the next UI product language.
What a wonderful challenge: helping a company consolidate their products under one visual brand, while maintaining their ability to present a white label version to the market.
Chad Fisher
Creative Director
Accounting for white label capabilities
In developing the future visual language for Transact, we placed a significant emphasis on creating a memorable and recognizable look and feel that could stand out in a crowded marketplace. However, we also recognized the importance of white label capabilities, particularly for universities and academic institutions that would need to customize the solution to fit their specific needs.
By allowing for customization, these institutions could create a consistent look and feel across all of their products, particularly in a campus setting. This approach not only helped to build brand recognition for transact, but also allowed for a more seamless integration into existing campus systems, ultimately resulting in a more streamlined and user-friendly experience for students, faculty, and staff alike.
Our pilot group was able to successfully process ticket sales at both the WCC and NCAA Tournament this year, and we are anxious to roll it out into different areas of campus in the upcoming year.
Design to enhance the campus experience.
These design changes rolled out to over 1,800 institutions and improved the digital extension of their college campuses for 12 million students.
