Unifi Onboarding: From 6 Weeks to Less Than a Day
Impact
Summary
ROLE
UX Designer
TEAM
Product, Go-to-Market (GTM) Team, Engineering, and UI Designer
TIMELINE
3 months, Part-time
CONTEXT
To grow beyond our core base of large, white-labeled clients, the business was looking to scale small and mid-size (SMB) merchants through our existing plugin on major eCommerce platforms.
At the time, getting a merchant live took an average of 6 weeks, with a member of the sales team walking each merchant through setup.
MY WORK
-
Led discovery and competitive analysis
-
Designed the merchant UX across 4 different eCommerce platforms
-
Conducted expert interviews
-
Drove the design process with several different stakeholders: Product, Go-to-Market (GTM) Team, Engineering, and Legal
Problem
The Go-To-Market (GTM) team had to walk every new Small and Medium Business (SMB) merchant through setup, limiting how fast the business could scale Unifi.
Discovery
I built my understanding of merchant needs by reviewing the current state of each platform and speaking with client-facing teams:
Considerations
From the discovery phase, I identified two primary considerations.
-
The experience needed to be combined across four platforms:
2. The experience needed to work for both the onboarding and settings page.
The second constraint significantly narrowed the possible approaches. A stepper or checklist pop-up would work well for onboarding, but would create a confusing returning customer experience.
I decided to move forward with a progressive disclosure model, since it was suited for both use cases.
At the time, about 70% of our merchants were on Shopify and they held the majority of the market share, so we decided to prioritize redesigning that experience.
Design Process
1
2
3
After narrowing down the interaction model, I took an inventory of the settings across platforms and created a comparison table.
From there, I grouped the settings into categories. For example, “Advertising Placement” for choosing where the widget would appear on their website.
Then, I went through each setting and simplified the language wherever possible.
If it made more sense to use a technical name (for example, a developer on the client’s team who is setting up Unifi for them), I added tooltips and inline guidance to meet both user needs.
Prototyping & Validation
Once I had the rough structure of the experience, I moved into mid-fidelity design and prototyping.
Given the time constraints of the project, I decided to conduct expert interviews to review the flow. Overall, the feedback on the redesigned flow was positive, but surfaced some opportunities to refine the experience.
Final Designs
After updating the experience, I worked with a UI Designer to create the high-fidelity specs for the Shopify flow:
The other three platforms (WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento) followed shortly after:
Outcomes
Reflection
The most obvious gap in this project was testing with actual merchants. Given the timeline, I think the internal review of the flow was the right choice. But if I had to do this project again, I would have pushed for post-launch testing with merchants.