Website Tools Installation
Redesigning the flow that connects users to powerful 
lead generation.
Podium Marketing
1+ Year
Shipped Q2 & Q3 2022
Before a user can leverage Podium’s tools for lead generation, marketing, and conversion, they need to connect their CMS.
Discovery and definition
Podium provides several Website Tools that users can leverage to help increase their lead generation. One of the most popular is Webchat. Podium’s Webchat is a text-based widget that users can add to their website to generate up to 11x more inbound leads. The process for installing the webchat widget on their site can be complicated depending on the user’s CMS—as they have to copy and paste a unique script into the HTML editor of their site.
In discovery, we started to understand that the existing process for connecting Podium to a user’s CMS was arduous and long—with 20+ steps depending on the CMS. The steps and visuals were often old and no longer accurate, leaving users to aimlessly try different solutions in the hopes that they were able to haphazardly connect the widget—or they would hand the task off to someone else, often increasing the time to completion.
Keeping in mind a goal to make the platform more self-servable, we set out to create an installation flow that didn’t require the help of an onboarding manager or website administrator to get through. Some questions we asked ourselves were:
• What CMSs are our users using the most? (i.e. Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc.)
• Do users manage their website on their own or do they have a website administrator that would be doing the installation?
• How might we tailor the experience to better suit the CMS they are using to increase completion rate?
• What are the existing drop off points?
• Can we better integrate the different Podium tools that need a CMS connection into one installation flow, rather than needing multiple connections?
Designing a System
We started by running an audit to generate accurate documentation for the most up-to-date instructions for installing the Podium script for every CMS that we supported. We then updated our out-dated instructions and eliminated unnecessary or redundant steps.
While design worked to build a new, self-servable structure for the installation flow, dev worked to move every org over to a new architecture that supported the use of one-script-for-every-tool rather than one-script-per-tool (one script to rule them all).
We learned that over 50% of our users leveraged Wordpress as their primary website builder which allowed us to circumnavigate resourcing shortages and focus on a tiered approach to release.
We discovered that the largest drop-off point was a step requiring users to enter their URL. We worked with the Growth and Onboarding teams to collect the user’s URL during onboarding and hand it off “down-stream,” which greatly reduced the drop off we were seeing.
