Persona 01
The performance-marketing merchant.
Hands-on and speed-first. Wants to launch fast and sell hard, and will work around rough edges to keep moving.
SPEED-FIRST
HANDS-ON
Growth-driven
Sticky.io
A 5/5 “willing to refer” from a CTO-led team: we researched and rebuilt Sticky.io’s merchant onboarding around how merchants think, not how the platform was built.
E-COMMERCE
·
Web app
·
Staff Augmentation & UI/UX Design
At a glance
Discovery to tested prototype,
in one focused engagement.
W1
W2
W3
W4
W5
W6
W7
W8
01
Weeks 1 — 2
Discover.
A structured situation analysis, a pre-kickoff survey, and in-depth interviews with the Sticky.io experts who onboard merchants, plus a benchmark of four rival platforms.
02
Weeks 3 — 4
Define
Turn the research into two merchant personas, a clearer setup sequence, and a wizard-led onboarding concept built around how merchants think about their business.
03
Weeks 5 — 7
Design
Move from wireframes to high-fidelity mockups and a clickable prototype, iterating tightly with the client and testing the flow with real merchants.
04
Week 8
Systematize
Hand off a design system and style guide, and introduce design operations into the product and engineering teams.
Drag / scroll →
team
Embedded
Production lead and designers, staff augmented
research
5 interviews
Onboarding experts, plus a 4-platform benchmark
APPROACH
Wizard-led
Guided setup, resequenced for merchants
VALIDATION
5/5
Client “willing to refer,” Clutch
The Client
The commerce engine behind thousands of subscriptions.
web-app · Staff Augmentation & UI/UX Design
Sticky.io is a San Francisco subscription-commerce and payments platform. Founded in 2009 as LimeLight CRM and rebranded in 2020, it gives thousands of merchants the tools to run recurring billing, subscriptions, checkout, offers, and customer management from one system, with hundreds of integrations behind it. In June 2021, during our engagement, sticky.io closed a $90 million facility with Goldman Sachs Asset Management to accelerate its platform and growth.
That depth is what merchants value, and also what made the platform hard to start. Standing up a store meant configuring products, billing models, offers, payment providers, and campaigns before going live. Sticky.io asked WANDR to fix the part of the experience where that complexity hit hardest: merchant onboarding.
Founded
2009 As LimeLight CRM, rebranded sticky.io in 2020
HQ
San Francisco Globally distributed team
Backing
$90MGoldman Sachs facility, June 2021
The Challenge
The onboarding was organized around the platform, not the merchant.
Sticky.io is powerful, and it exposed that power at setup. The team came to WANDR for hands-on help making the first-run experience clearer, evaluated by people who could also raise the bar on usability.
Problem 01
A first run that mirrored the data model.
Merchants had to set up in the order the software was built, campaign first, then offers, then product, rather than the order a business owner thinks. Small mismatches compounded the confusion, like clicking “Customers” in the menu and landing on a “Contacts” page.
Problem 02
Getting live took people, not minutes.
A merchant reached value through a chain of sales, discovery, and kickoff calls, a curated demo, webinars, and training, often with a solutions engineer doing the setup for them. Benchmarked rivals let merchants self-serve from a trial the same day.
Problem 03
One platform, two very different merchants.
Performance-marketing merchants wanted speed and were willing to work around rough edges. Branded-account merchants wanted polish, support, and no back-and-forth. One onboarding had to serve both without dumbing the product down.
Problem 04
Power the merchant could not see.
The platform had features many merchants did not know existed, category names that caused confusion, and analytics they had learned to distrust. Too much was surfaced at once, and what the platform could and could not do was unclear.
Problem 05
Scalability.
MPL needed a system, not a one-off page. Without a shared design language and component library, every new segment, promotion, or market would mean rebuilding from scratch. The experience had to scale as fast as the roadmap.
Drag / scroll →
Before / After
Same platform, resequenced around how merchants Think.
Drag the handle to see how merchant onboarding changed, from a configuration-heavy setup that followed the data model into a guided, wizard-led flow that walks a new merchant from sign-up to a live campaign.
Before
After WANDR
Our Role
Staff augmentation that went from research to execution.
01
A structured discovery: situation analysis, a pre-kickoff survey, and a certainties-versus-unknowns exercise with the team
02
Five in-depth interviews with the stakeholders who onboard merchants day to day
03
A competitive benchmark of Shopify, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, and Stripe onboarding
04
Two research-based merchant personas and a mapped onboarding process flow
05
A wizard-led onboarding concept, information architecture, and clearer naming
06
Wireframes, high-fidelity designs, and a clickable prototype tested with merchants
07
A usability measurement plan, with per-task ease scores and a System Usability Scale target
08
A design system and style guide, and design operations introduced into product and engineering
Research
We studied how merchants actually onboard before we redesigned it.
We spent the first phase of the engagement doWANDR interviewed the people closest to the problem, the internal specialists who set merchants up and often do the setup for them, then benchmarked how the best self-serve platforms handle a first run.ing three things in parallel — user research, competitive benchmarking, and an audit of the current site.
01
Stakeholder interviews
Onboarding was so complex the experts often did it for the merchant.
Across implementation, client support, sales, training, and engineering, the pattern was the same: getting a merchant live leaned on human hand-holding rather than the product guiding the way.
02
PLATFORM BENCHMARK
Every rival let merchants self-serve; Sticky.io needed a sales chain.
Shopify, BigCommerce, and PrestaShop start from a trial with guided onboarding, empty-state prompts, and test products, and no sales call. Stripe and PrestaShop also separate developer and non-technical paths in plain language.
03
the "perfect setup", in order
Stakeholders could describe the ideal sequence the product never guided.
Settings, products, billing models, offers, providers, campaigns, then testing. The redesign turned that shared mental model into a wizard the platform could walk merchants through.
The three personas we built.
Persona 02
The branded-account merchant.
Mature and sophisticated, with high expectations. Wants an intuitive system, real support, and no back-and-forth, and is focused on brand and lifetime value.
POLISH-FIRST
WANT SUPPORT
LTV-focused
Sequence the setup.
Speak the merchant’s language.
Principle 01Trust
01
Guide the first run.
A wizard and help tour that walks merchants through setup in the order a business needs, so a new merchant can move from sign-up toward a live campaign without having to understand the whole platform first.
Principle 02Segment
02
Rebuild navigation around the business.
A step-by-step side navigation that follows the logical order of standing up a store, with clearer category names, so “Customers” no longer opens a “Contacts” page.
Principle 03Bingo
03
Design for both merchants, in plain language.
One experience that fits performance-marketing and branded accounts, with a consistent naming convention and a Stripe-style split between technical and non-technical paths so every merchant finds their footing.
Principle 01 of 03→ Continue scrolling
THE KEY INSIGHT
The onboarding mirrored the database, not the merchant.
As one sticky.io stakeholder put it in discovery, the platform “requires users to start with creating a campaign, then offers, then product... the UX reflects the technology and data model, not how clients might think about their business.” The power was never in doubt.
The fix was to resequence the first run around the merchant’s mental model and guide it, so setup felt like running a business rather than navigating a database. And with a demanding, technical buyer, earning that redesign took senior client management as much as strong design.
The engagement was reshaped from a high-level audit into hands-on execution, and a CTO who had moved to wind the work down ended it thrilled.
Screen 01 of 08→ Scroll horizontally
Outcomes
What the work delivered.
By the end of the engagement, sticky.io had a rebuilt merchant onboarding experience, a delivered design system, and a relationship its CTO wanted to continue.
01 · Onboarding
Rebuilt
Onboarding resequenced around how merchants think
from data-model order to a guided, wizard-led flow
from data-model order to a guided, wizard-led flow
02 · Prototype
Tested
A clickable hi-fi prototype validated with merchants
paired with an ease-of-use and SUS test plan
paired with an ease-of-use and SUS test plan
03 · System
1 System
Design system and style guide delivered
plus design ops introduced to product and engineering
plus design ops introduced to product and engineering
04 · Trust
5/5
Client “willing to refer” on Clutch
from a wind-down notice to “many more to come”
from a wind-down notice to “many more to come”
Ratings reflect sticky.io’s verified Clutch review of the engagement (quality 4.5/5, willing to refer 5/5). Company financing is a sticky.io milestone, not a design result.
Client Voice
In their words.
“
While their skills were valuable, it was ultimately their client management and interaction that impressed us.
Brett McLaughlin
Chief Technology Officer, sticky.io
