During my initial interviews with Nexon, I pitched the need for a redesign of their checkout flow as it was unnecessarily cumbersome for new and returning users alike.
Eighteen months after my hire, I was finally able to get my project greenlit after a company restructuring and access to more developers to work on the project. After creating a service proposal and presenting to the senior management of Nexon America, work began in mid Q4 2020.
What follows are the issues I felt needed to be addressed, why, and the solutions to the problems.
Before proposing a single screen, I mapped the existing flow end-to-end and tracked every place users stalled, backtracked, or asked for help. A handful of recurring friction points surfaced — none catastrophic on their own, but compounding into a checkout that felt heavier than it had any right to be.
Excessive clicks and input fields padded every purchase, even for users who already had a saved payment method on file.
Gateways weren't easily interchangeable — switching between Visa, PayPal, or Amazon mid-flow forced users to restart their selection.
The flow treated every purchase as a first purchase. There was no expedited lane for the players buying NX week after week.
No coupon redemption or obscure code field — promotions ran outside the flow, leaving revenue and goodwill on the table.
The entire FAQ section linked off-page with no accordion or contextual help, breaking the flow whenever a user had a question.
Warnings and informational messages used inconsistent tone, placement, and severity — eroding trust at the most sensitive step.
Taking a holistic design approach, one key flaw stood out: the checkout was backwards. Users were forced to determine how they were going to pay before selecting the actual product. In this case, NX — Nexon's in-game currency. It would be like signing on to Amazon, choosing Visa as your payment method, and then starting to shop.
Returning users might have gotten used to this experience after repetition, but it would probably seem awkward to new users making purchases for the first time. My goal was to redesign the flow to be closer to a user's already ingrained and understood process of purchasing items online — product first, payment second, confirmation last.
The original flow stretched a single NX purchase across seven discrete screens — gateway selection, login, region check, amount entry, confirmation, processing, and receipt. Each screen carried its own load state and back-button trap. By collapsing redundant steps and committing to a product-first order of operations, the redesigned flow lands users at confirmation in roughly half the screens.
The key driver behind elevating this experience was getting players back into the game as fast as possible. There were several lengthy input interactions that were addressed and optimized for our returning players.
The new flow surfaces a persistent "Add Balance" pill in the global nav, auto-fills location and billing from saved-account inference, and folds the order summary into the same screen where payment is confirmed — eliminating the dead-end confirmation page entirely. Stored payment methods are masked by default, matching the pattern returning users already trust from every other site they shop on.
The average checkout time with the previous flow was 2:16 across all payment gateways. The new design landed at about :32 during pre-launch testing — and once shipped to the Western region, completion rates climbed in lockstep.
A 76% reduction in average time-to-purchase across every payment gateway tested in pre-launch.
Western-region completion lifted by seven points post-launch — a meaningful uplift on a flow at this volume.
Reordering the flow to match how players actually shop reduced first-time-buyer drop-off and matched conventions from familiar e-commerce sites.
Inline FAQ accordions and consistent warning patterns measurably reduced checkout-related support volume.