Designing an activation experience that sticks

Background

Recharge’s canvas builder was designed with the purpose of providing merchants the flexibility to start with a pre-set or blank canvas, and build whatever experience they desired for their customers.

But an interesting observation stood out: Same-session deactivations were high.

Research and insights

I distilled insights from 30+ hours of FullStory sessions, conducted a competitive teardown of the canvas builder, and led cross-functional working sessions to align, and win stakeholder buy-in.

Two important insights emerged

  • Long-term retention > Quick conversions: Dropping merchants directly into a canvas encouraged them to "fly through" and quickly activate. This meant, time to completion and the rate of activations was high, but since merchants had no idea what they just set up — it contributed to same-session deactivations.

  • Merchants want to know more: They hovered around tooltips, highlighted helper texts (on the canvas), read copy, expressing a desire of wanting to understand more about what they were setting up.

Goal

Cut same-session deactivation rates in half, while holding or improving activations, and raising overall post-launch retention across our three biggest checkout offerings: Upsell All, Cross-Sell, Subscription Widget.

My approach

I led the design of a new activation pattern and anchored my designs exploration in three key principals:

  • Optimize for what happens five minutes after an activation

  • Guidance from step one, all the way to activation. No dropping merchant, and letting them figure it out

  • Don’t let merchants deviate, or skip steps essential for their success

I asked: How might we help merchants activate flows, that they actually want to keep?

Step-by-step wizard

The canvas builder is now replaced with a guided wizard. Each step is supported by a status, and context that require merchants to stop, read, interact. Introducing a level of guidance and positive friction that prevents "flying through" the setup.

Steps are housed in cards that expand when interacted with. Using progressive disclosure, only one step is expanded at a given instance.

Pre-set smart defaults

Most steps default to values that are ideally required to achieve success post-activation. This reduces the merchants's cognitive load, and puts emphasis on reading, and understanding as opposed to figuring out what what needs to be set up.

Steps that do not have an ideal value, require merchants to add them, based on their requirement. An example of this would be selecting a product to be swapped from and to. Each step has a CTA that nudges the merchant to 'Mark as done' when complete.

Guardrail based experience

Steps that have dependencies, guide merchants accordingly. Intentional use of copy, tooltips, banners, and validation states create that set of guardrails that then inform merchants of the required actions that needs to be taken, before proceeding to the next step.

Smart overviews

From squint metrics, to overall flow configurations, the active state is designed to provide, just the right amount of information that is required to help merchants access how the offering is performing, at a glance.

How did the new pattern perform?

Where we’re at currently

To test the efficacy, I compared how the new pattern performed against the canvas builder, by referencing sessions from FullStory, during a consistent time window of three months (with similar sessions) for both patterns.

  1. Upsell All
    Guided wizard: Aug - Dec; 156 sessions
    Canvas builder: Apr - Aug; 134 sessions

  2. Cross-Sell
    Guided wizard: Sep - Dec; 98 sessions
    Canvas builder: Jun - Sep; 102 sessions

  3. Subscription widget
    Guided wizard: Nov - Dec; 19 sessions
    Canvas builder: Oct - Nov; 26 sessions

Time to convert: Slower by design

Merchants take more time to understand each step, which correlates with higher retention and greater stickiness, while increasing the overall time to convert.

Activation rate: A new paradigm, an expected outcome

The guided wizard introduces a learning curve, that resulted in an expected drop in activation rates, when compare to the traditional and familiar canvas builder (that merchants would 'fly-through'). Conversion rate should catch up, as the pattern gets familiar with merchants.

Same-session deactivation: The headline result!

This is where the guided wizard earns its place. Same-session deactivation collapsed on the two offering with enough sample size to read, and held flat on the third.

Conclusion

The canvas builder may secure a slightly higher activations at first, but the guided pattern consistently proves to be the engine for long-term retention, 2× to 4× stickier and it’s easier to use. This performance, establishes the guided wizard as the default pattern for activating flow experiences.

We're now expanding the guided wizard to include advance actions such as A/B tests, and Conditional branching, and are adopting it across all Recharge offerings.

Let's collaborate

Got something cooking? Whether it’s just a sketch or fully scoped, I’m happy to help.
Shoot me a note: zaidalirasool@gmail.com

Zaidali Rasool, Rhizhome (C) 2025