Scaling Unifi by Cutting SMB Onboarding from 6 Weeks to Less Than a Day
Overview
Unifi lets businesses offer Synchrony financing options to shoppers at multiple points in the buying journey, from browsing to checkout.
Reason
To grow beyond our core base of large, white-labeled clients, the business was looking to scale small and mid-size (SMB) merchants through our existing plugin on major eCommerce platforms.
At the time, getting a merchant live took an average of 6 weeks, with a member of the sales team walking each merchant through setup.
My Role
I designed a self-serve onboarding flow that took that timeline from 6 weeks down to under a day for most merchants, while reusing components across four different eCommerce platforms to save time on implementation and maintenance.
Role: UX Designer
Team: Product, Go-To-Market (GTM) Team, Engineering, and UI Designer
Impact
Problem
The Go-To-Market (GTM) team had to walk every new Small and Medium Business (SMB) merchant through setup, limiting how fast the business could scale Unifi.
Previous Experience
Design
Research & Discovery
To understand how we might make this process self-serve for small and medium businesses, I began building my understanding of merchant needs through experts who interact with merchants regularly and existing documentation:
From this review, I mapped out a table to as a reference for the functionality differences.
Primary Setting Categories
Across four platforms, merchant setup ultimately fell under these two categories:
1. Advertising Placement
2. Payment Processing
Design Principles
I designed around advertising placement and payment processing while accommodating platform-specific differences.
The primary design principles I had in mind while designing, created in collaboration with the Product, Engineering, and Design team, were:
Early Explorations
I reviewed existing experiences that included guided user setup to understand established patterns:
Guided Onboarding Elements
Drawing inspiration from step-by-step flows, I began sketching out an experience that would break down the steps into manageable sections for merchants:
Lo-fi Flows
Mid-Fidelity Flows & Expert Interviews
Once I had mid-fidelity wireframes, I conducted expert interviews with the colleagues who were directly involved in merchant setup.


As we walked through the flow, I was able to capture additional friction points that might come up, given their past experience.
Solution
The result was a reusable core experience underlying all four platform integrations, minimizing upfront engineering effort and maintenance down the line.
The development team started with Shopify, since it held the largest share of clients, then went on to develop the remaining platforms.
Reflection
The most clear trade-off we made was relying on the Go-To-Market (GTM) and engineering teams as proxies, rather than validating directly with merchants before launch.
Given the timeline, I think that was the right decision. If I had the chance to run this project again, I'd like to include a small round of merchant usability testing pre-launch, or build in a post-launch feedback loop with newly-onboarded merchants to validate our assumptions.