Enhancing integrated payment experiences on college campuses

About

In 2019, following its acquisition by Reverence Capital Partners and independence from Blackboard, Transact launched a visual language initiative to establish its own cohesive design system. With products previously tied to Blackboard’s aesthetic, Transact faced a lack of identity as a standalone entity. The team developed a unified design system and guidelines to create consistent, user-focused experiences across its product suite, reinforcing Transact’s commitment to delivering seamless campus engagement and payment solutions.

Challenge

Multiple and disparate products integral to 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 enable universities to create more efficient financial management processes for campus-related student services.

User Value

Empowering students to seamlessly navigate their college campus

A familiar and responsive environment that seamlessly tracks and manages school-related expenses—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 partnership of Design and Marketing created more meaningful experiences.

The team conducted a series of workshops and curated preliminary mood boards to capture and catalog inspiration for specific style and aesthetic themes to ensure the next phase of the project remained 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

Tansact

A focused strategy to cover Transact’s vast product space

We identified a diverse range of Transact products that revealed inconsistencies and ambiguities in user experiences, underscoring the need for a cohesive design system.

After implementing the design system to selected core screens, the team created a component library that leveraged the power of material UI. These components established the base foundation for the design system.

  • Brandon Lewis

    Brown University

    2/4

    Summer Payment Plan

    Auto Pay

    You set up auto pay!

    View details

    Sandwiches

    Salads

    Smoothies

    Drinks

    46

    Meal Credits

Accounting for white label capabilities

To shape Transact’s future visual language, we balanced creating a distinctive, market-ready identity with the flexibility of white-label capabilities for academic institutions. This approach enabled universities to customize solutions to align with their branding, ensuring consistency across campus products. The result was a seamless integration into existing systems, enhancing user experiences for students, faculty, and staff while bolstering Transact’s brand recognition.

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.

Linda Wilson

Financial Systems & Services Manager, Gonzaga University

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.

Let's talk!

I'm currently looking for a full-time role and am open to freelance opportunities. Send me a message if you'd like to work together!

Or email me at swava.pearl@gmail.com.