Challenge

 

At Smule, we developed mobile apps where users can purchase subscriptions to create content. With 70% annual growth rate of the user base, we had some business challenges in following three areas:

 

• With our dependence on Google and Apple payment system, Smule doesn’t have any data on user subscription churn.

• Through our user study, we found that users are making two decisions when they are purchasing. The first decision is whether they can afford the price the products charge, and the second is whether they would like to spend money on this product. Without a good testing structure for payment, we don’t know which one is the most critical reason for different international countries.

• We don’t have the capability to allow users to purchase consumable goods along with subscriptions through Apple or Google payment system.

 

Goal and Solution

Our goal is building the Smule direct billing system to solve these three issues. The solution is launching the direct billing system on Smule website while providing an easy payment solution for our mobile users.

 

The challenge for this project are:

• We targeted in a very short timeline, 3 months to design, develop and release MVP  to US users and another 3 months to release to the rest of the world.

• We have a very limited design (2 designers) and engineer (3engineers) resources.

• We are not sure if users are willing to take extra efforts to pay us on the website given mobile payment difficulties.

• This feature covers payment collection, information storage and tax handling that involve many other departments inside of the company.

 

My role on this project is the lead product designer and UX designer. I worked on defining the design visions, and design principles for this payment experience, and also provided the flow & wireframes for desktop and responsive web mobile solutions.

 

The whole payment system includes 5 parts: payment information collection, accounting, invoicing, email confirmation and updates of payment information. This feature was released in December of 2016. We achieved the first-month target in two days. On the mobile device, the successful purchase rate after the landing page is 92%. In 2017, this direct billing system will contribute 10% of Smule total revenue.

 

 

Release Results