Enabling Payments at Podium
When I joined Podium in January of 2021, a new feature called text-to-pay was rapidly gaining adoption as a powerful tool for our customers. Despite requiring a fairly technical setup, Podium merchants were eager to use the feature to request and accept payment by text. To support this business growth, I joined the payments team to lead the design effort. Our primary focus was making text-to-pay easy to discover, trial and onboard into with Podium.
Our key business goals were to shorten the time it took to try text-to-pay and to grow the number of active text-to-pay users in Podium.
We designed the payments hub to onboard and activate merchants in Podium. For the activated merchant, the hub provided important payment information like recent transactions, disputes, statements, and summaries.
Growing payments
Payments started with a few simple surface areas.
1. A UI to build invoices for customers
2. A view of all transactions
As the product grew in adoption, our goals sharpened towards self-serve growth. To make this possible, we instrumented a 1-click account creation flow that allowed merchants to try the product without the hassle of upfront friction or onboarding. The original flow required 90 clicks to enable payments.
Our ENG team architected a new account model that removed upfront data requirements. This allowed new customers to trial payments with one click.
We guided merchants to try sending a payment request to themselves during their first-time UX. I concurrently led the effort to create first-time user experience patterns across Podium. We gave users a specific first key action and then offered practical next steps.
After merchants completed their first payment request, we highlighted their activity and next steps to complete account setup.