Zilch Acquisition Journey Optimisation

Zilch is a BNPL company that offers customers subsidised credit with no interest or late fees. Think of Klarna but being able to use it wherever you want, in-store or online while being able to get up to 5% back in rewards as well.






Zilch has over 5 million customers on the native mobile app and has become profitable after just 4 years. When I joined, Zilch wanted to continue the rapid growth and acquire more quality leads while increasing their understanding of the app.

Contribution

UI/UX Design

A/B testing

User Research

Design System

Timeframe

1 year +

The problem

Zilch's acquisition funnel was hemorrhaging potential customers and revenue. 34% of users failed at account creation, only 65% made their first purchase, and the inconsistent UI design undermined trust in our financial product. For a credit lending and cashback platform serving 5M+ customers, this represented massive revenue loss and a fundamentally broken first impression.

The constraints

  • Initial top of funnel focus meant we were stuffing users into a broken journey, while ignoring the main UX issues

  • Gaps in event tagging in our onboarding flow meant inconsistent and sometimes unreliable data sets

  • Multiple shifting business priorities impacted our development cadence

My impact and key outcomes

I lead design initiatives for customer onboarding, working closely with my Product Manager, data, customer service and engineering teams. My focus was to improve the sign up flow and onboarding education while ensuring our solutions align with broader business objectives and company goals.

Key metrics I helped improve

  • +21% overall funnel conversion through systematic UX improvements

  • -75% login friction - reduced from 4 attempts to 1 per 30-day period

  • -11.4% TTC (time to completion) due to increased clarity and decreased friction

Business impact

  • +£3.6M lifetime value increase from core conversion improvements

  • +£1.056M in net profit from a single A/B test (limit display optimization)

  • increased the lead to first-spend rate from 65% to 79% within 10 days post ID verified

Design Leadership Impact

  • Lead the development of the new UI24 Design System and reskinned onboarding

  • Established data-driven design process with custom MixPanel dashboard for ongoing optimization

  • Led comprehensive UX research across multiple data and user touch points

How I helped prioritise our issues

Our initial approach was to improve the top of the funnel and get more leads but this was driving users into a fundamentally broken experience.
I advocated for a strategic pivot, using data analysis and user feedback to identify the core issues and their interconnected impact on the business.


The first step was to bring onboarding in line with the rest of the app (reskin) + improve the copy as it was left behind due to shifting priorities, then carry out some quick A/B tests while systematically going through the flow, identifying the main issues and fixing them.

We also had some fraud attempts and bot attacks which helped expedite the work on starting with the account creation/login issues first.

1.

Quick wins through strategic A/B testing

2.

Fix account creation and login issues

3.

Improve task completion

4.

Improve education and first purchase

The journey to a better onboarding

Being a part of the growth and acquisition team meant that fixing and improving the sign up and onboarding flow was a continuous, iterative process. As the lead designer on this project I carried out reseach on my own, collaborated with the data and dev team while presenting the key concepts to the senior leadership team.

Good onboarding is like a good waiter - it's there when you need it, invisible when you don't, and leaves you feeling taken care of the entire time. 🤲

1. Quick Wins Through Strategic Testing (The Foundation)

Discovery

We had a sharp drop in our Lead to Registered metrics and needed to improve it by at least 0.5%. To understand the root causes, I interviewed newly joined team members and customers about their signup experience, while also carrying out extensive competitor analysis. This revealed key gaps in our value communication and user guidance.

Insight (The problem)

Users were dropping off before completing registration because our customers were put off by inconsistent/incorrect copy and couldn't see the benefit of the credit limits being offered. Competitor analysis showed we were underperforming in communicating our key differentiators compared to other fintech apps.