Payments Hub
Redesigning Cards & Accounts and envisioning a unified payment command center for Home Depot Pro.
This project was part of a long-running enterprise initiative to modernize Home Depot Pro’s payment infrastructure. Rather than targeting a launch date, I focused on reducing risk through customer listening sessions, iterating concepts based on real feedback, and building shared understanding across product, engineering, and business stakeholders — so that when the time comes to build, the team has a validated direction to move fast on.
Project Brief
Role: Lead Designer — in collaboration with PM, engineering, and UXR
Platform: Home Depot Pro — Desktop Web
Status: Designed, not shipped — active strategic work informing future platform direction
The Cards & Accounts page was one of the most-visited destinations in Home Depot Pro’s account management experience — and one of the most overloaded. It tried to do too much with too little structure: credit cards, payment settings, remote purchase authorization, and team access all lived in the same undifferentiated space. At the same time, a broader strategic question was being explored: what would it look like to give Pro customers a true payment command center — a single place to manage all their payment tools, understand their spending, and take action?
This project spanned both: a near-term redesign of Cards & Accounts to address concrete usability problems, and a more future-focused vision for Payments Hub as a unified experience.
The Challenge
The existing Cards & Accounts page had grown organically over time. Credit cards, checking accounts, and payment settings were crammed into a single view with no clear hierarchy. Remote Purchase authorization — a critical feature for enterprise accounts — was buried and difficult to manage, particularly for accounts with dozens of cards across multiple team members.
For large Pro accounts, the scale of the problem was significant: hundreds of credit cards, multiple team members with different access levels, and remote purchase settings that varied card by card. The existing interface wasn’t designed for this kind of complexity. Managing it required too many steps, too much hunting, and too much reliance on calling in to support.
The broader Payments Hub vision introduced a second layer of complexity: beyond fixing what existed, what would a genuinely useful payment command center look like? One that surfaced spending trends, savings opportunities, and cross-product value — not just a list of cards. And how do you design for that ambition without losing sight of the immediate, practical problems pros needed solved today?
Approach
The work started with a close read of the existing experience and clear documentation of its structural problems. From there, the design exploration moved quickly — sketching on paper first to work through information architecture questions, then moving into Figma to develop and compare concepts.
Early concepts explored a range of approaches to organizing the Cards & Accounts section: how to handle Remote Purchase settings relative to individual cards (inline toggles vs. a dedicated section vs. an expandable drawer), how to surface card-level detail without overwhelming the overview, and how to accommodate both table-view power users and card-view browsers.
After refining those early explorations, I brought two distinct concepts to customer listening sessions — structured conversations designed to surface what Pros actually needed, not just what they said they wanted. Those sessions directly shaped subsequent iterations and clarified which structural decisions were load-bearing versus which were open questions.
In parallel, I worked on the longer-horizon Payments Hub vision: a modular command center with tiles for each payment product (Cards & Accounts, Remote Purchases, Instant Checkout, HD Pass, Pro Allowance), spend summaries, savings insights, and streamlined permission management. The goal was to design something that felt genuinely useful — not just a reorganized version of what existed, but a place Pros would actually return to.
Key Decisions
Separate Cards & Accounts from Payment Permissions
One of the clearest structural decisions was splitting the monolithic Cards & Accounts page into two distinct tabs: one for managing payment methods themselves, and one for payment permissions. Keeping them merged created confusion about where to go to do what — and made it harder to design either experience well. The tab structure gave each a clear scope and made it easier to scale both independently.
Give Remote Purchase settings a consistent home
Remote Purchase authorization is one of the most consequential settings in a Pro account — it determines who can approve purchases made remotely on behalf of the account. But across early concepts, there was no settled answer for where it lived or how it behaved. Concepts explored per-card toggles (A2), a dedicated Remote Purchases section (A3), and a table-view column approach (C1). Customer listening sessions helped narrow this: Pros wanted Remote Purchase settings visible and accessible without requiring them to expand or drill into each card individually. That finding pushed the design toward greater inline visibility with clear, consistent entry points.
Design Payments Hub as a command center, not a dashboard
The distinction mattered. A dashboard shows you information. A command center lets you act on it. The Payments Hub concept was built around modular product tiles that surfaced each payment tool’s most important snapshot data alongside a direct “Manage” action — so a Pro could see their Remote Purchase balance, their active card count, and their Instant Checkout vendor list at a glance, and get to the right place in one click. The hub also explored value-over-time framing: cumulative savings, spend trends, and optimization opportunities — giving Pros a reason to return to the page beyond just managing individual settings.
Outcome
The project is ongoing strategic work. The near-term Cards & Accounts redesign produced a set of well-tested concepts with clear rationale, grounded in customer listening sessions and iterative design exploration. The research surfaced specific friction points — particularly around Remote Purchase discoverability and the cognitive load of managing settings across large card inventories — and gave the team concrete, validated directions to pursue.
The longer-horizon Payments Hub vision established a credible target state: a unified experience that consolidates payment management, surfaces spending insights, and gives enterprise Pro accounts the kind of control and visibility their scale actually requires. As Eric from the 9/5 presentation noted, building awareness of payment features through intuitive exposure “is addressing a major bottleneck at the Pro Desk in our stores” — which is exactly the kind of cross-functional alignment this type of work is designed to create.
The design didn’t just surface problems — it left the team with a documented direction, a set of open questions worth answering next, and a compelling vision for where the experience could go.
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