Stripe New User Experience
What
Onboarding experience redesign at Stripe
My Role
Product engineer, software
The Team
Julia Chaves, Mikito Takada, Alex Reichart (SWE), Karolis Kosas (design), Marc Freed-Finnegan (product), Luting Chen (data science), Brad Barry (manager)
Making it easier to get started with online payments
Summary and Results
In 2019 I worked with a small, multidisciplinary team to improve the onboarding process for new Stripe users. Stripe offers online payment and business management tools. Through user interviews, metric analysis, and testing, we identified user pain points, in particular that Stripe’s coding-focused onboarding process was no longer suitable for it’s increasingly diverse user base. We revamped the onboarding flow to allow users to self select into technical and non-technical experiences, boosting 1-week application submission rates by 1.6%. User feedback showed reduced confusion and frustration with the new onboarding experience.
Problem Scoping
We took a 3-pronged approach to identifying pain points in Stripe’s existing onboarding flow:
User interviews: We conducted dozens of interviews with new Stripe users
Metrics: We adding tracking events and building dashboards to monitor the onboarding funnel.
Dogfooding: We setting up our own fake businesses on Stripe, taking note of challenges we encountered.
I personally set up and sat in on user-interviews, created and analyzed metrics dashboards and led several dogfooding sessions.
One of the key observations from this work was that while Stripe had been built as a tool for developers, over the years more non-technical users were signing up for the platform, often via third party apps, and these users were confused by the developer-oriented experience.
To help these users without alienating Stripe's more traditional technical users, we developed an onboarding flow that let users self-select into either group, and tailored their experiences accordingly. After signing up for an account, users were asked to choose between solutions which required coding, and those which did not:
Tailored Experiences
After making their choice, users were taken to the Stripe dashboard, and presented with a customized “getting started” checklist. For technical users, this included tasks like “Get your API Keys” and “Read API Docs”. For non-technical users, we built out a searchable library of no-code 3rd party solutions, and linked to this as well as to an “FAQ” page with common questions.
Stripe new-user onboarding flow. Users self-select into ‘technical’ and ‘non-technical’ experiences.
Non technical user dashboard, after selecting an integration from our library of 3rd party apps (note: {APP NAME} here would be replaced by the name of 3rd party app they’d chosen, e.g. “Shopify”)
Searchable Library of 3rd party apps providing no-code solutions
We tested dozens of different variations of this flow, running controlled A/B tests to measure conversion and conducting more user interviews to gain qualitative insights. This informed a number of design choices. For example, initial iterations didn’t have a “skip for now” button on the first page, but in interviews we learned that a small subset of developers hated these kinds of tailored onboarding experiences, so we gave them an escape hatch with the “skip for now” button.
Iterate and Revise
One of many alternative user flows tested. Here, questions were asked in a modal overlaid on the dashboard.