Overview
Clover, a leading purveyor of point-of-sale and business management systems for SMBs, has historically relied on its sales team and reseller partners to sign up merchants and create software and hardware packages for them. To increase sign-ups on Clover.com, we improved the purchase journey and gave merchants more freedom to choose the right system for their needs. I led content design on the project, from concepts through research and all the way through launch. All work was completed over an 8-month period starting in November 2022.
Background
Visitors to Clover.com were being presented with Starter, Standard, and Advanced bundles, and had to scrutinize an overwhelming comparison grid in order to evaluate what features and hardware were included in each. We wanted merchants to feel less confined in their choices and nudge them to think through what they really need in a system.
Concepts
We set out to design a flow in which merchants could build a custom Clover system with their preferred mix of hardware, plan, and accessories. We went mobile-first because more than half of prospective merchants navigate to Clover.com on their phones. I was challenged to not lean heavily on the names of the plans because some of them are not very descriptive, such as Payments, Essentials, Register. Could we even avoid the word “plan” completely to make it more about them evaluating their needs and picking features to match?
As we explored UI, I explored ways to frame the plans on the plan selection screen. Things I tried on: being explicit that features were additive, recommending based on business type, and playing with voice.
None of these were feeling quite right, in large part because crafting titles for the plans was a challenge. The main differentiator between Payments and Essentials is the ability to create an inventory of items, and the only differentiator between Essentials and Register is the ability to create variations of items.
Research
I eventually landed on a direction for the plan selection screen that felt on the right track, with the Essentials plan distilled down to “a basic point-of-sale setup”. In the spirit of wanting to make plan selection feel like you’re building off of a base plan, we created a separate, optional step for the restaurant plans. Technically, users would be switching plans if they made a choice on that page, but it might feel to them like they were adding onto a base plan.
Flow for testing
Research questions
Do merchants understand the choices in front of them?
What type and amount of information is needed for merchants to confidently make decisions?
What do merchants expect from specific UI interactions or terms that we use?
What else do they need to know in order to feel ready to make a purchase?
Our researcher carried out moderated, 30-min interviews with two prototypes. We spoke to business owners who are the decision makers across a mix of verticals (retail, services, quick service restaurants), with a mix of years of owning their business and experiences owning a POS system.
One prototype has no descriptive copy on the plan and device selection screens, and a shortlist of features for each plan. We thought that if people were going to open the accordion no matter what to see everything included in the plans, maybe we could keep the unexpanded view really clean. The other prototype has descriptive copy containing the primary features of the plan, and within the accordion you can see all features included in each plan, grouped into categories.
Key findings:
People preferred more information. They liked the descriptive text and having the longer list of plan features grouped helped with readability.
People understood that each subsequent plan contained everything from the previous, so I didn’t need to say in the description “Everything in the previous plan, plus X”.
Without the word “plans” anywhere, users weren’t sure if a device was included in the choices on the first screen. The illustrations may have added to the confusion.
The restaurants screen added friction for people who it did not apply to. It also looked like an upsell. One of the restaurant merchants we interviewed skipped to the next page. Users had already spent energy picking a plan on the previous page, so seeing a new set of features was confusing.
The changes we made to alleviate the pain points were:
Branched the flow from the start to show users the three plans most relevant to their business type. We added “Plans” as the CTA on the branching page, but kept the word “plan” off the selection screen in order to frame the question around their needs.
Without a restaurant add-ons step, we could change the CTA on the plan page to “Devices” to alleviate confusion about whether devices were packaged with plans.
Final flow
We did some refinement of the UI, and added back the plan names as eyebrow text so that they’d be listed properly in their cart at the end of the flow. (It would be confusing to see “Take and track payments” as a line item.) We applied the same treatment to the accessories page, so that all screens contain the same cadence of info: eyebrow, title, description, and accordion with more details. We ultimately reduced the number of features listed under each plan because the containers were getting really long.
Our hypothesis is that the system builder will be utilized at the top and bottom of the funnel, as an intro to our offerings that sets the stage for doing more research, and the tool merchants use to purchase once they’re ready.
Here’s what the final flow looks like for a restaurants merchant.
Results and future plans
We measured conversion by those who select “Continue” on the cart page, which leads them into a credit application that will determine whether they can process payments with Clover. Three months after launch, we saw that users are on average seven times more likely to convert after going through the system builder than had they added a preset bundle to their cart.
More users are using desktop than expected—45%—so we plan to revisit the design for desktop to see how to best take advantage of the additional space. I led an impact/effort matrix exercise on next steps in which I gathered up the items on our wishlist of small improvements, plus the nice-to-haves that didn’t make it into the v1, and other suggestions that had emerged post-launch. Many fit into the low effort/high impact quadrant, and updates are underway.