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Case study • Checkout flow

Bitpanda

2023

Meeting users where they are

Checkout flow

One of Bitpanda's most important metric is conversion from verified user to trader. With numbers not looking great, I was the designer that lead the initiative to reduce friction and create a flow that would change how people trade in the app.

Why I think this project is important

  • We made a great effort in the discovery face to uncover user behaviour and how to benefit from it

  • We managed all requests from stakeholders, especially going back and forth with legal

  • It was and still is a great improvement of user experience

This was a project that me and my PM (when I say we, that's it) owned from zero to release, leading two teams, payments and trading.

The status quo

The Bitpanda onboarding funnel looks as follows:

The problem is, 80% of users try to buy an asset without making a deposit first. Back in the day, users could not trade in Bitpanda without money in their account, meaning that when they tried to buy, they got confused because they couldn't and they dropped.

We asked ourselves was, how can we improve conversion and help user start trading easily?

Meeting the users where they are

When you buy at Amazon or bol.com, you do not deposit to your account and then buy. You select the product you want to buy and then pay through a checkout. So we suggested a checkout flow for Bitpanda.

The idea was to allow the user to deposit and buy in a single, seamless flow. The user would just buy whatever amount of an asset they wanted and in the background the payment would be processed, added to the user's account and then execute the trade. For them, just like buying socks in Amazon; for us, a deposit that instantly became a trade.

Going from this complex task, involving different flows:

To a much simpler one, that integrates both the deposit and the trade in a single, seamless flow.

We created a first UI concept to showcase what the flow would look like and presented it to different stakeholders: legal, blockchain, compliance and product being the main ones.

Stakeholder management

After showing the concept, they brought some new limitations that we had to navigate:

  1. In the backend, checkout merges the deposit+buy, so legally we cannot tell the user they are buying if they are actually making a deposit

  2. After the deposit arrives to the user's account, we are not legally allowed to automatically execute the trade, the user has to accept the final price themselves

  3. We cannot freeze prices because that is too much risk, so we need to add an extra step in the middle that makes the user execute the trade themselves

To solve these issues, we had tweak the overall experience in a way that it would not be as seamless. We got creative and managed to deliver a single flow that satisfied all the stakeholders and still managed to feel like a normal checkout.

Final UI

The final flow was divided in two steps, so cannot be said that is a seamless experience anymore. The user would define how much they want to buy and what payment method they want to use first. After the payment is processed, they would arrive to the "confirm investment" screen where they can then confirm the trade.

We found a compromise with legal using wording that complied with their requirements and kept the user in "buy mode".

After the deposit, the user had to confirm the investment in a second step. Once they accepted the quote, the trade was executed.

You can find the prototype here

Outcomes

  • 7% increase in conversion from verification to first trade

  • 18% reduction in time from verification to first trade

  • 25% of users convert from verification to first trade through the checkout flow

  • 85% flow conversion rate

  • 99% of users accept the final quote after their deposit is processed