WordPress.com Simple Payments Guided Discovery

About this project

The designers at WordPress.com were divided into breakout groups to tackle small, quick wins. Our group was assigned to tackle Simple Payments, a WordPress.com feature that allows users to easily add a payment button to their sites for collecting payments.

Role

  • Strategy
  • UX and UI design
  • Email campaign design (in collaboration with another designer)

Problem

Premium and Business plan customers want to make money with their site. While the Simple Payments feature allows them to do that, and is much loved by customers who use it, discoverability isn’t easy.

We had two choices to approach this problem – one was through organic discovery, to allow users to able to easily find this feature; two was through guided discovery, which means informing the user about this feature and what it can do.

Because of time constraints and the fact that this is a “quick win” project, the team opted for the second approach.

Solution

The team decided to:

  1. Create an email campaign to send out to users who currently do not have a Simple Payments button installed on their sites
  2. Build a guided tour to walk users through the feature from the email campaign

Email campaign design

In collaboration with another designer, we came up with this email design. In this design, it was important to not only highlight the capabilities of this feature, but most importantly, include success stories of users who are using Simple Payments to create an emotional connection and establish trust.

As a part of this approach, I personally reached out to one of our users to learn more about them and their experience with Simple Payments. From there, we used their testimonial for the email campaign.

In addition, I created custom illustrations to give the design a more a fun and approachable feel.

Guided tour

Upon clicking the email’s call-to-action, the user will be taken through a quick, guided tour to onboard them on how to add a Simple Payments button to their sites instead of just dropping them immediately into the application without any sort of guidance.

Outcome

We already know that users who find immediate value in a product are less likely to churn. During this project, the WordPress.com refund rate varied – ~17% for Premium and ~20% for Business plans. After the launch of this project, we saw a decrease of 2% in the 30-day refund rates for customers under those plans.

Overall, while this was a quick win project that had quite a narrow scope and tight deadline, it was quite successful. Never underestimate the power of quick wins!