New Shoppers

Beta trust, competitive market, one shot at onboarding

KONEK was entering a crowded payments market as a beta product, still unproven to the people it needed to convert.

Onboarding was the single highest-leverage point in the funnel: any friction, confusion, or trust gap there would cost sign-ups before the product ever got a chance to prove itself. Over 4 months, working with UX design, product, and marketing at Interac, I owned the research that turned onboarding from a launch risk into a conversion driver.

Three phases, each earning the next

Given the timeline, I didn't want to wait for a full usability study to catch the obvious problems, so I started fast and cheap: a PURE heuristic evaluation.

Scored through the lens of a proto-persona built from market data, it flagged high-cognitive-load steps before a single user was ever in the room. Because PURE assigns a numeric score, it also let me benchmark KONEK's checkout against the competitors it actually had to beat: a score of 29 against PayPal's 5 and Shop Pay's 7, across nearly triple the total steps.

Part of that gap was structural, not a design flaw: KONEK's checkout hands off to the shopper's own bank mid-flow, a step none of its card-based competitors need.

Once design acted on the findings that were actually fixable, I raised the bar. A second PURE pass on the redesigned flow (V1.1) confirmed real progress: the score dropped from 29 to 19, entirely from tightening the review-and-payment screens, which fell from 15 to 5. Sign-up and the bank hand-off held steady at 7 each, since neither sits fully inside KONEK's own UI.

But expert review alone doesn't prove real users will get through it, so I ran an unmoderated A/B test, recruiting 20 Canadian shoppers who already used PayPal through UserTesting, split 10-and-10 between the original and redesigned flow. Unmoderated was the right call specifically because the core task, online checkout, is one users already know. I needed unfiltered behavior, not a moderator's guidance.

The last phase raised the bar again: after the usability study, "usable" wasn't the goal, "competitive" was. I ran moderated interviews with 8 existing PayPal and Shop Pay users, to learn what they actually prioritized in a payment flow and how KONEK's redesign stacked up against the experience they were already loyal to.

Speed beats features

The clearest signal across all three phases: new users cared about speed more than anything else.

Not more features, not more upfront profile-building. Just a fast path to their first transaction.

New users prioritized speed over features, so we rebuilt the flow around getting there faster.

That single insight drove the highest-leverage decision: we re-prioritized the flow to front-load checkout and push profile creation later, layering in trust signals, clearer legal copy, and lightweight tooltips to build confidence along the way rather than upfront.

The dip between "authorized payment" and "completed checkout" had one recurring cause in both versions: participants often missed the final "Place order" button back on the merchant's page, mistaking KONEK's own confirmation screen for the end of the flow. "I felt like the payment was completed before, I did two tabs at the end, but I felt like the last tab wasn't necessary," one participant said. The fix wasn't a KONEK screen at all — it was rewriting the hand-off copy to tell users they still needed to place the order on the merchant's page.

Account creation told a cleaner story. Where V1's holdouts wanted to "just pay for it and get it over with," V1.1's participants had a different read entirely: "So, I do think in a real situation if I do see this option coming up more frequently, I would probably just keep the information." Front-loading checkout meant account creation never felt like it was standing in the way of the transaction.

The redesigned flow took account creation from 3-in-10 participants to all of them, the single biggest lift of any research effort I've led, and it held up even though every participant walked in already loyal to a competitor.

Why KONEK still scored behind PayPal and Shop Pay

The PURE score told a more complicated story than the usability numbers. Even after the redesign, KONEK's 19 still trailed PayPal's 5 and Shop Pay's 7 — for three reasons that had nothing to do with how well the interface itself was built:

• –Payment liability sits with the bank, not KONEK. A financial institution assuming liability for the transaction needs more robust authentication than a stored card number, which structurally adds steps a card-based competitor doesn't carry.
• –The comparison assumed a first-time user. PayPal and Shop Pay's scores reflect a shopper who hasn't yet benefited from browser autofill; without it, their scores would have been 10 and 12, not 5 and 7.
• –A new privacy policy step, added to V1.1 on legal's direction, wasn't part of V1's score at all — a step that improved compliance but counted against usability.

None of those are fixable through interface design alone, which is exactly why the usability numbers, not the heuristic score, were the real evidence that the redesign worked.

What I'd do differently

Running an unmoderated study taught me that all the risk sits in the script, not the session.

There's no moderator in the room to clarify an ambiguous task, so every instruction has to be unbiased and airtight before it ever reaches a participant. It was a powerful lesson in how a well-designed unmoderated study can be a fast, scalable way to gather unbiased behavioral data and validate a decision.