Designing for Growth — Paddle

Discovery / Design / Development / Testing

Paddle is a revenue delivery platform that allows software developers to sell software online without having to worry about payments, varying taxation/VAT rates and complex subscription systems.



Paddle is one-stop-shop for online payments - providing a plug-and-play checkout UI, invoicing system as well as an in-browser interface where customers can manage their payments from end to end.

In 2018, Paddle experienced a huge growth of 3,858%. As a result of this, Paddle received Series B funding.



With sights being set on Series C funding, 2019 looked to be even more successful for the exciting B2B company.



In April, myself and another Designer were tasked with designing, developing and maintaining a scalable, website UI to withstand the next few years of growth.

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Component Design

With new branding having been designed by an external agency a few months prior, we set out to design components that complimented the brands new identity.



Paying persistent attention to contrast and accessibility, we designed a set of reusable, multi-purpose components. Our focus was to ensure that components used shared states/styles where additional states could be added for different use cases.

Demonstrating Relevant Features

Working closely with Product Marketing we segmented Paddle customers into three persona's:



Orchestras - Customers with a gross revenue of over £200K.



Quartets - Customers with a gross revenue of over £50K.



Soloists - Customers with a gross revenue of under £50K.

With the focus of the company for 2019 being set firmly on Orchestras and Quartets, we began planning a new Features page with this in mind.



With access to past recordings of sales calls and pitches, we were able to quickly identify keywords that were discussed in conversations with our target market. With this, we arranged sessions with the Sales team to validate our findings.

Paddle’s Features page

Scalable illustrations designed with international expansion in mind

Generating Credibility

In order to support both the Marketing/Sales teams in acquiring leads, it was vital that our blog posts and case studies were engaging but also easy to scan.



Working closely with Paddle's in-house Content team, we focused our attention on finding optimum font sizes, creating engaging transitions and sourcing engaging imagery.



We included a contents section at the top of long-form posts in order to ensure that users could navigate to topics of interest and included calls-to-action in areas that we perceived would receive high levels of engagement.

Paddle’s Case Study page

CTA’s positioned in strategic locations on long-form blogs/case studies

Development

Paddle pages and components are built using Jekyll as a foundation. The page content is stored in .yml files and generated locally. This allows Paddle's website to load fast but also lessens the risk of relying on a database.



I built the websites key pages/blog into a GIT-based CMS called CloudCannon. This enabled the Content team to create and edit pages in a user friendly UI.