Alejandro Hernández
Building merchant tools for creating and managing data-driven offers
Company
Bancolombia Innovation Lab
Type
Interaction Design · Prototyping · Merchant Flows · Design QA
Role
Product Designer
Team
Product Design · UX · Product Owner · Engineering · Data
Year
2020–2021
Plink Ofertas was a merchant-facing product created within Bancolombia’s innovation lab, designed to help businesses create, manage and optimize promotional offers using transactional and demographic data from the bank’s payment ecosystem.
As part of a multidisciplinary product team, I focused on interaction design, high-fidelity prototyping and implementation alignment, helping translate complex workflows into scalable and intuitive product experiences.
Plink Ofertas aimed to transform underused transactional data into actionable business opportunities for merchants. The product allowed businesses to create and manage promotional offers while using contextual insights from Bancolombia’s payment ecosystem to make better targeting decisions.
One of the main challenges was balancing simplicity and flexibility across a highly diverse merchant base. Some businesses operated only a few points of sale, while larger retail chains managed hundreds of locations, creating very different operational needs within the same product experience.
At the same time, many onboarding and configuration flows depended on infrastructure that wasn’t always reliable or standardized across Colombia, forcing the team to continuously adapt product decisions around scalability, usability and technical feasibility.
Credits: Javier Calle
A key part of the product experience involved helping merchants understand and act on complex transactional and demographic data during the offer creation process.
The platform explored ways of surfacing contextual recommendations based on customer behavior, business type and purchasing patterns, helping merchants make more informed decisions around audience targeting, timing and promotional opportunities.
Designing these experiences required simplifying large amounts of information into interfaces that felt approachable across businesses with very different levels of digital literacy and operational complexity.
High-fidelity prototyping became a key tool for validating workflows, aligning stakeholders and surfacing implementation constraints early in the product lifecycle.
Realistic prototypes helped uncover mismatches between the platform’s categorization logic and how merchants actually understood their own businesses, leading the team to rethink parts of the information architecture and simplify onboarding flows.
They also exposed interaction and technical complexities that weren’t initially visible during ideation. Features like image uploading and cropping introduced implementation requirements that exceeded the project scope, helping the team redefine expectations, adjust workflows and establish clearer content guidelines before development.
The offer creation flow evolved continuously as the team refined how merchants interacted with targeting options, promotional setup and business insights across different operational scenarios.
As the platform evolved, the interface system also expanded to support new workflows, interaction patterns and dashboard states. Components were continuously refined and reused across increasingly complex merchant scenarios, helping maintain consistency while the product matured.
Product Owner: Paul Castaño, Design Direction: Javier Calle, Product Design: Javier Calle, Alejandro Hernández, UX Support: Juan Reina