Rebuilding the checkout for the whole suite

Given that engineering, leadership and marketing all had a stake in this flow, and yet none of these groups appeared to be looking at quite the same picture of it, we recognized an opportunity to bring greater cohesion to the process. To address this, we pulled together the analytics, the market analysis, the existing user flows and the metrics we were ultimately trying to move, and leveraged AI to help organize that collection of inputs into a single scoping document, rather than allowing it to remain four somewhat disconnected opinions.

This approach helped bring the conversation onto a shared set of facts, which, while a valuable and necessary step, was ultimately still a long way short of achieving true alignment. In other words, a document could tell three teams what the problem seemed to be, but it could not necessarily show them the answer, and as a result, it did not, on its own, move stakeholders toward consensus.

Because the suite shared a single checkout across all of its products, we made the decision to design it as shared infrastructure. This approach cuts both ways: every improvement we made had the potential to land across the entire ecosystem at once, and, in the same respect, so could any mistake.

Ultimately, it was the prototype that sold this direction, and it did so fairly quickly. We used Figma Make to build out the flow variations in a short amount of time and put a working experience in front of internal stakeholders. Purchase flows tend to attract a significant amount of opinion, and, in a review meeting, every theory about the step that could be losing people tends to sound reasonable, largely because nothing in the room is necessarily able to contradict it.

Something you can actually click through, however, can. Watching a person get stuck on the very step you had been defending tends to end an argument almost immediately, and without anyone necessarily having to lose it in the process. As a result, the team got behind the direction within a matter of days, and ultimately, the design that shipped was the one that users were able to complete.