🏆 When design meets success metrics

Short introduction

About the company

SeQura is a fintech company that offers various buy now, pay later (BNPL) payment methods for businesses to provide to their buyers.

About my role

I was the Sr. Product Designer of the Shopper Growth and Conversion team, and my goal was to find opportunities to improve the growth and conversion of the company while considering the shoppers' economic well-being and aligning them with the company's objectives.

About the products

SeQura offers different products that merchants can integrate across their websites to make shoppers aware of the option to pay in installments.

About the widget

The Widget is one of the key promotional assets integrated into a merchant’s website. It appears on the product page and helps shoppers discover available installment payment options at the moment they are evaluating a purchase. Beyond creating awareness, the Widget includes a “More Info” popup that provides additional context and reassurance, supporting shoppers during their decision-making process. For a deeper dive into how we applied Behavioral Design principles to improve comprehension and confidence, I recommend checking out this case study: Applying Behavioural Design

Objective of a new widget design

As a team, one of our primary goals for Q2 2023 was to increase both acquisition and checkout completion rates across the seQura journey.
After analyzing the end-to-end experience, I identified an opportunity much earlier in the funnel: the Widget. As the first touchpoint between shoppers and seQura, it plays a critical role in creating awareness and helping users understand their financing options before reaching checkout.

What we discovered

The Widget had been originally designed to support only two financing products. Over time, seQura expanded its offering to four and eventually five different financing solutions, but the Widget was never fundamentally redesigned to accommodate this complexity.
As a result, new products and requirements were continuously layered onto an outdated component, creating limitations in both communication and scalability.
To validate these concerns, I conducted a heuristic evaluation, a competitive benchmark and data analysis. All exercises revealed a consistent pattern: the Widget struggled to capture attention during the shopper's natural scanning behavior on product pages. Important information was often overlooked, reducing its effectiveness as an awareness and conversion asset.

Hypothesis

If we redesign the Widget to improve visibility, information hierarchy, and product communication, more shoppers will notice and understand the available financing options. As a result, a higher number of users will enter the seQura checkout flow and successfully complete their purchase.

Managing the risk

Although the Widget appears to be a small UI component, it sits on top of complex legacy logic and multiple financing configurations. Implementing a full redesign would require significant backend effort and coordination across teams. Before committing to that investment, we needed evidence that the proposed direction would generate meaningful impact. For this reason, we decided to run an experiment first, validating the hypothesis before moving forward with a complete implementation.

Why it mattered

If the Widget fails to attract attention, lacks clarity, or communicates financing options ineffectively, shoppers may never consider using seQura in the first place. Improving this touchpoint meant not only increasing visibility but also creating a more scalable foundation for future products while strengthening seQura's brand presence. At the time, merchants had extensive control over the Widget's visual appearance, resulting in inconsistent experiences across websites. Standardizing the experience became an important part of the long-term strategy.

Aligning Business Needs and Market Reality

The Widget was one of seQura's most strategic assets. It was often the first interaction shoppers had with our financing options and played a critical role in influencing purchase decisions.
Because of its impact, almost every area of the business had expectations about what the Widget should achieve. Product wanted to improve acquisition, Marketing wanted stronger visibility and space for promotions, Sales and Account Managers needed a compelling value proposition for merchants, and Engineering needed a solution that could scale within the constraints of a complex legacy system.
My first objective was to ensure that every stakeholder felt heard before making any design decisions.
Together with the Product Manager, I conducted a series of conversations with key stakeholders, including the CRO, Key Account Managers who work directly with merchants, integration specialists responsible for implementing the Widget, and Engineering leads. These discussions helped us understand expectations, frustrations, and opportunities from different perspectives.

Looking beyond opinions

Stakeholder input provided valuable context, but I also needed objective data to understand the real performance of the Widget.
I analyzed engagement metrics, comparing impressions against interaction rates to understand how effectively the Widget attracted attention and encouraged exploration. While I cannot disclose specific figures (it was low: only a small percentage of impressions resulted in users clicking on it.), the analysis confirmed a significant opportunity to improve visibility and engagement. In parallel, I worked closely with the Tech Lead to understand the complexity hidden behind what appeared to be a relatively small UI component. The Widget supported multiple financing products, merchant-specific configurations, and years of accumulated technical decisions. Understanding these constraints was essential for evaluating the feasibility and risk of potential solutions.

Understanding the competitive landscapes

The Widget was not competing for attention in isolation. On many merchant websites, shoppers were exposed to alternative financing providers offering similar payment options.
To understand how we compared, I conducted a benchmark of leading competitors in the Spanish market. The goal was not to replicate their solutions, but to identify patterns, strengths, and opportunities that could help seQura stand out during the critical decision-making moment.
This analysis highlighted several areas where our Widget could improve, particularly around visibility, clarity of information, and communication of value. 👇

Navigating trade-offs

One of the most important parts of the process was balancing competing expectations. Marketing wanted the flexibility to communicate promotions and discounts. Product needed to improve acquisition and conversion. Engineering needed to minimize the risk of introducing changes into a technically complex component. Meanwhile, we wanted to create a more scalable and consistent experience for shoppers.
These constraints forced us to make deliberate trade-offs throughout the design process, prioritizing solutions that delivered business value while remaining technically feasible and maintainable over time.