Julianna Wang

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Save Fee Saver Adoption

Pass on your credit card processing fees with
Online Fee Saver

How it works

Enabling this feature will set your default payment method to credit card and ACH bank payments. Whenever you send an online payment request, if customer pays by

Credit Card

You pay

0%

ACH Bank Payment

You pay

0.5% + 25¢ *

*Fees capped at $6 per transaction

Available on

Invoicing

Payment Pages

Payment Request

HelcimPay. js

Not now

Enable now

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Pass on your credit card processing fees to your customers.

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By enabling Online Fee Saver, you agree to Helcim Fee Saver terms and conditions. This feature will be enable on all eligible products.

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Pass on your credit card processing fees with
Online Fee Saver

How it works

Enabling this feature will set your default payment method to credit card and ACH bank payments. Whenever you send an online payment request, if customer pays by

Credit Card

You pay

0%

ACH Bank Payment

You pay

0.5% + 25¢ *

*Fees capped at $6 per transaction

Available on

Invoicing

Payment Pages

Payment Request

HelcimPay. js

Not now

Enable now

Problem

In winter 2023, Helcim, a payment processor company, launched Fee Saver (FS) to help merchants reduce processing costs. Despite its potential, the feature’s adoption rate stagnated at 5.7% one month post-launch.

Impact

I took the initiative to investigate adoption barriers, uncover key friction points, and drive a cross-functional solution—ultimately increasing adoption 8X to 63% and creating a scalable design pattern for future feature promotions.

Role

Lead Product Designer

Core responsibility

UX Design

Visual design

Product strategy

Research

Team

1 Product Manager

3 developers

Timeline

1 months

TL;DR

The Imapct

Adoption increase

8X

Fee Saver adoption skyrocketed to 63%—an 8x increase within weeks of implementation.

Strong drive for revenue growth

Directly contributed to Helcim’s revenue growth, a key factor during its Series B funding efforts.

New global design pattern

Established a global framework for feature promotions across Helcim’s product suite.

Leadership and Mentorship

By partnering with another designer and driving alignment across teams, I ensured a win-win outcome.

Understanding the Problem:
Why Weren’t Merchants Using Fee Saver?

What is Fee Saver? A Feature to Save Merchants Money with 1-click

Fee Saver lets merchants pass credit card processing fees to their customers instead of paying them out of pocket. With one-click, merchants can save businesses thousands of dollars every year.

Given its simplicity and value, we expected a high adoption rate. However, the actual adoption fell short.

🚨 The adoption rate was much lower than anticipated.

Breakthrough Insight:
It wasn’t a lack of interest—it was a lack of visibility and an overly complex activation process.

I tried multiple approaches to gather data, analyze them, and capture insights. After several trials and errors, I finally found a way to uncover the root cause.


I compared adoption trends between new merchants who encountered FS during onboarding1 and beta merchants who were notified via email campaigns.

The data revealed a striking contrast:

89.2%

of new merchants activated FS during onboarding.

5.7%

of beta merchants activated FS through email

[1] Fee Saver had been released with another product 6 months before our launch. To promote it on that product, the company integrated it into the onboarding process, enabling all new customers over the past 6 months to activate Fee Saver during onboarding.

This confirmed two critical insights:

Lack of Exposure

New merchants discovered to FS in onboarding, while existing merchants relied on a single marketing email - causing low awareness.

High Friction in Activation

Existing merchants had to follow a lengthy process: open the email → log into the platform → navigate to Payment Page → create or edit a payment page → manually enable FS. Each step increased the likelihood of drop-off.

The real issue wasn’t a lack of interest—it was a lack of visibility and an overly complex activation process.

Is this actually true?
Let's review it from users' perspective

Why doesn't the email campaign flow work?

If we think about the email campaign flow from users' perspective, this is what happened:

Many merchants won't see the email.

Many merchants may never see the email due to overflowing inboxes, spam filters, or simply ignoring promotional messages. By its nature, it won't reach 100% of active users, so email engagement is unpredictable and often low.

Even those who see it face too many steps to activate.

Even if merchants open the email, they might receive it at a random moment—when they’re not thinking about payments, not ready to activate a new feature, or don’t have access to the product. And even if they are interested, the process requires too many steps—clicking a link, logging in, searching for the feature, and manually enabling it. With each extra step, the likelihood of drop-off increases. It’s not that they don’t want to activate it—it’s just not the right time, and the effort feels too high in the moment.

Reframe the problem

HMW increase the exposure of FS and reduce the friction of activation?

Exploration:
Designing Initial Solution

To address these issues, I designed a few options and shared the following one with stakeholders for their feedback and support. The modal acted as a tutorial, guiding merchants through the activation process step-by-step. This design maximized exposure by ensuring every merchant saw it upon login.

Why it works:

In-app Promotion Maximizes Contextual Exposure

Email promotion alone wasn’t enough. In-app promotion targets users right when they're on the product, simplifies discovery, and encourages immediate action.

Interactive Walkthrough Simplifies the Learning Curve

Interactive walkthrough simplifies the learning curve, highlight key functionality, captures attention, and eliminates the needs for external resources.

Value-Driven Messaging Drives the Activation

Thoughtfully crafted copy that addresses user needs, highlights benefits, and motivates action.

Getting buy-ins:
Concerns from Stakeholders

When I presented this solution to stakeholders, I encountered some concerns:

Turning Constraints into Opportunities:
Let's partner with other teams and make it benefit multiple products

Determined to move forward, I adopted a collaborative approach to address these concerns:

Resource Limitation? What If We Partner…

With limited engineering bandwidth and competing priorities, I had to find a way to implement changes without overwhelming the team. I partnered with a designer from another team whose product use FS as well. We brainstormed together and explored new ideas that can be used for both our product. By proposing a shared solution, I convinced their team to implement the design as part of their development efforts. Our team only needed to adapt and reuse the implementation, significantly reducing the engineering workload.

ROI Concern? Let's Make it Benefit Multiple Products…

Expanding the solution to benefit multiple products and teams added significant value. I secured buy-in from the Head of Design by demonstrating how the design could scale across Helcim’s ecosystem. This buy-in unlocked additional support from the Design System team, whose front-end developers handled implementation, further alleviating resource constraints for both teams.

New design strategy

Focus on a universal, scalable approach that highlights the feature's global benefits across all products.

Iterations:
What Exactly Did We Optimize?

Here is a breakdown of the things we changed based on the new design strategy.

Bring the Idea to Life:
Collaborate with Cross-functional Team

Collaborating with a product marketer, we refined the messaging for clarity and engagement, while an illustrator and motion designer helped bring it to life with branded visuals and subtle animations. To ensure seamless implementation, I worked closely with front-end designers to package it as a reusable component, making it easy for full-stack developers to adopt.

The End:
Final Design

After extensive exploration and thoughtful trade-offs, I led the team to land on this final design. When customers navigate to Fee Saver-eligible products, a modal appears to educate them about the feature and promote activation.

The modal provides a seamless way for customers to activate Fee Saver directly. For those who prefer to skip or activate it later, selecting "Remind me later" transforms the modal into a banner pinned at the top of the page. This ensures the feature remains visible and easily accessible, allowing customers to revisit it when ready.

Enable Fee Saver

"Not now" flow

Why it is even better?

On top of In-app Promotion, and Value-Driven Messaging, it also has

Educational Content to Reduce User Hesitation

By explaining the "why" and "how" of the feature, educational content builds user confidence, reducing hesitation to try it.

Cross-Product Design Approach Boosted Feature Visibility

The design worked across multiple products, promoting FS and related features simultaneously

Built a Standardized Approach for Feature Adoption

The implementation established a global design pattern for future feature promotions.

Reflect on the Journey:
Key Learnings

Take ownership when there’s a gap.

You won’t always have dedicated research support or predefined feedback loops. That means you’ll need to keep moving forward, even without all the answers. Own the momentum of your ideas—don’t let them stall in endless discussions or uncertainty.

🪫

System thinking can help maximize design impact.

It’s easy to focus on solving one problem, but stepping back to consider the broader context often reveals greater opportunities. It’s easier to convince others that your idea is high ROI when you can show how it unlocks new opportunities in the product. The more surface area that your idea touches, the more people have the potential to be excited about it.

Data is an essential guide.

Even when data is limited, digging deeper can provide meaningful insights. By analyzing adoption trends, I uncovered key issues that shaped my hypotheses and guided the solution. Seeing adoption rates rise from 5.7% to 83% showed me the power of data-driven decisions, and sharing these findings helped align teams and build confidence in the path forward.

Design can demonstrate business impact.

Most non-designers, especially business leaders, aren’t naturally trained to see how design drives business value. It’s up to us, as designers, to bridge that gap. Every small opportunity is a chance to demonstrate impact—so push your ideas forward, advocate for design, and turn vision into results that prove its value.

What's Next:
Scaling a Solution into a System

While this project was a step forward, the challenge of driving feature adoption isn’t unique to Fee Saver—it’s a recurring issue across many products. Before leaving the team, I saw an opportunity to extend this solution into a more systematic approach that could benefit future launches.

Mid-term: Build a systematic design pattern for feature promotion

Build a structured framework to help teams determine which promotion pattern to use, when to use it, and how to optimize it for impact. This system will provide:

✅ Standardized design patterns for different types of feature launches.

✅ Clear decision-making guidelines for selecting the most effective pattern.

✅ Success metrics and iteration loops to refine the approach over time.

Long-term: Create a cross-functional launch process

Work collaboratively with PMs, Marketing, and other stakeholders to establish a clear, repeatable process for feature and product launches. The goal is to ensure that:

✅ Feature promotion is a shared responsibility across teams, not an afterthought.

✅ Marketing, product, and design efforts are aligned for maximum adoption.

✅ A launch playbook is in place to ensure every new release gets the visibility it deserves.

By bridging design, product, and marketing efforts, we can ensure that every feature launch is intentional, strategic, and successful.

✦ THANK YOU ✦ FOR VISITING

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