Project start: April 2020 Timeline: 2 months Client: SumUp Services: UX, UI, User Research, IA & Data Analytics Platform: Responsive Website
SumUp is a leading fintech company, operating across 32 markets on 3 continents. It is building a world where small businesses can be successful doing what they love, enabling 2 million merchants around the world to accept card payments in-store and online.
The challenge.
In the first half of 2020, we noticed that sales of our merchants started to fall. The economy of small businesses was strongly impacted by the Coronavirus crisis. In order to act quickly to try to propose solutions to this problem, we formed a dedicated team at SumUp to think about alternatives, and deliver a product that could help merchants to overcome this moment, providing access to new clients and generating new revenue streams.
My role.
I was the lead Product Designer, working closely with two Product Designers and a Product Manager, Developers, Data and Marketing team. I worked on the discovery process, data analysis, research, sketches, prototypes, usability testing, final screens and copywriting.
Design tools.
Design process.
The first thing we did was work on data mining to understand the size of the problem. To complement this information, we ran a user survey. With the data in hands, we ran a Design Sprint with all the team to align the problem and design solutions.
The idea was to create a business search platform by geolocation. I assembled the prototypes and followed the development with the team of engineers. We released it in a test market. We made improvements and changes after the release to improve the experience for customers and merchants.
Specific issues.
We had a great challenge to try to get the work right the first time. We wanted to positively impact our merchants’ business as soon as possible. So, we decided to reduce the scope and get rid of some features.
1 – Geolocation
The whole idea of the platform is based on geolocation. The customer should enter his address. The platform would show the nearest merchants, which would be displayed on the map. As we wanted to reduce scope, we changed the map to a list of results, listing the merchants closest to the address.
2 – Merchant details
We decided to not set up a showcase with the product and prices of each merchant. The main idea was to exhibit the merchant’s details and contact channels.
3 – Nailing CTA
What would the best CTA be for the consumer? The only interaction was a Whatsapp message, so we had to be very careful about it. At first, we have a lower than expected 2% click-through conversion. Was it a problem with the flow? Or was the CTA’s commitment too high? We did a search on Hotjar to get more information about it.
The results.
We managed to release the platform still in time to help merchants and consumers within the context of social isolation caused by the pandemic. It was a very important milestone for the team, and everyone felt very fulfilled with the release. The project was embraced by the company’s board, and now it has Growth support. In the first 20 days, almost 600 merchants signed up. Also, we had 25k unique users, and 220 CTAS to start a conversation with a merchant.
