Role: UX design lead
Timeline: 5 months (8 weeks design & research, 12 week build)
Team: User researcher, Product manager, 2x front-end & 3x back-end developers
The Problem
Ratio.City's license purchasing process was creating friction for our customers and operational burden for our team. Customers had to contact our sale department for assistance, while the team had to manually handle invoice creation and license upgrades - often resulting in lengthy wait times for customers and unnecessary work load for our team. Conversion from free trials to paid users was at just 4%. We wanted to make it quicker and easier for users to sign up & manage their accounts with the goal of converting more users and encouraging users to upgrade their accounts.
Business Objectives
• Reduce time taken for user to buy licenses from days to minutes
• Increase conversion rates from free trial users to paid users from 4 to 10%
• Decrease operational overhead of customer facing team (from 30% of their time to 5%)
• Improve user autonomy in managing their own subscriptions
• Generate recurring revenue by simplifying upgrade paths
• Keep up with moving industry standards and set us apart from our key competitors
• Increase conversion rates from free trial users to paid users from 4 to 10%
• Decrease operational overhead of customer facing team (from 30% of their time to 5%)
• Improve user autonomy in managing their own subscriptions
• Generate recurring revenue by simplifying upgrade paths
• Keep up with moving industry standards and set us apart from our key competitors
Research & discovery
Best practise research
Our research began by conducting competitor and best practise research. As in-app payments are common among SaaS products, we mainly looked at tools we pay for ourselves (for access reasons) with high UX standards. This included Figma, Miro, Adobe, Loom, Netflix, Spotify, Notion and Monday.
Personas
Our user researcher created personas for each of our key user types and drafted customer journey maps; this included munipal planners, private planner, developers, lawyers and architects. We considered who would be making the payments, how they would be introduced to the platform and their familiarity with payment processes.
Design process
The first step was to set up the IA: this was a complex task that took time to figure out. We worked together with the industry and sales teams who held most knowledge on current processes.
Next we created lo-fi prototypes for moderated user testing with our current customers. Feedback from user testing was positive, including:
‘It was clear and straightforward to do - very similar to other programmes I have used’
Dan (Developer)
Hi-fi prototypes were developed and more testing was conducted via Useberry (unmoderated) with 25 industry professionals.
• 90% of users completed the flow
• Click rates which were generally accurate
• Clarification needed on difference between 'Explorer' & 'Builder' licenses
• Clarification needed on how to add more than 1 data region to the package
Comments included:
"Didn't realise that we have to press the ‘add more’ data button at the bottom of the modal to be able to select additional regions. Would be easier if I can just select additional regions directly?"
Unnamed tester, Architecture industry
You can see the heatmaps and survey results below.
Final design
Using the research insights and user feedback, I created our final designs. Working closely with the back end team was essential to ensure the Stripe integration was seamless; we wanted the transition between our platform and the Stripe platform to be invisible.
Below is a run through of the final design prototype created in Figma.
A fully annotated file was handed over to the engineering team in phases.
Project learning & next steps
This project is currently in the build phase, with launch scheduled for October 2025.
User acceptance (moderated and unmoderated) will be carried in October, and design amends will be monitored.
Analytics will be collected focusing on:
• Change in % free trial conversions
• Numbers of users making changes to plans after purchase - when/what
• Chat or get in touch requests to our sales team
From a personal development perspective, this project taught me a lot about product-led growth strategies, introduced me to Stripe methodologies and grew my knowledge of customer psychology when purchasing products. The competitor and best practise research section of the project was particularly useful here as so many standard UX flows have been established in this space.