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Rafael MottaPedro Marques
Rafael Motta & Pedro Marques

Engineering

September 5, 2023

4 min. read

The Power of Customization

Product leaders turn to Footprint because of how our customizable interface empowers companies to boost conversion. Unlike most KYC/KYB onboarding products, Footprint doesn't just operate in the backend. Our frontend component allows us to collect fraud signals based on how people fill out our IDV form, and enables us to give you immediate security. Despite these benefits, we don’t think the act of filling out a form should lead to a massive drop off of potential users. With the right user experience, you can guide your customers through to the destination of account creation. And we do this in the look and feel that makes sense for your company. Footprint wants to solve—not create—problems for product leaders.

We set out to build the best and most secure onboarding experience in the market. Unsurprisingly, achieving such goal requires a meticulous engineering and design effort. From day one, we knew that if we wanted to succeed we needed to build a solution that would not only scale from a technical perspective, but also from a design (product) perspective.

We were quick to realize that every company is different, and therefore will have distinct needs. For one, each of our customers has their own branding. Their own style. Their own look and feel. It is their product and we should adapt to it, and not the other way around. To truly empower companies to own their onboarding experience, our embeddable onboarding solution must be as flexible as possible, which is one of the reasons why we invested heavily in design and engineering foundations early on. These foundations allow us to move quickly and have an incredibly modular and customizable solution.

Every customer that uses Footprint decides how Footprint will be embedded into their product. We do not decide what their onboarding flow should look like, but rather provide the technology and an optimized user experience to remove the toggle between fraud and friction. To enable us to solve for fraud + security in an embeddable onboarding flow, the design must still perfectly match customers' brand. There should be no disconnect between how they onboard their customers and how these same customers experience their core product. Above all, we see ourselves as partners and facilitators, and we are here to help customers focus on growing their businesses instead of worrying about security and compliance.

Unleashing user interface freedom

Footprint was designed to be customizable: we want our customers' onboarding flow to feel like a natural extension of their core product. We test and optimize the user experience as much as possible, and will continuing doing so, but interface elements – such as colors, fonts, spacing, border radii, etc. – should be owned by our customers.

We make it easy and quick for companies to customize our out-of-the-box onboarding experience to match their brand. More than 80 variables can be customized, essentially allowing our customers to modify all interface elements with little to no limitations. It's important to note that no one needs to customize the flow if they do not want to – we offer a perfectly fine and well-crafted default onboarding experience out of the box – but we encourage it because we believe brand consistency is key.

Our out-of-the-box onboarding experience

Naturally, Footprint is available on all platforms: desktop web, mobile web, and apps, including App Clip (Apple devices) and Instant Apps (Android devices). One could then wonder if they would need to customize their onboarding flow for every platform, and the simple answer is no.

We designed the system with a token-based approach that is shared across platforms, which means that the token you use to customize the primary button background color, for instance, is the same everywhere else. You do it once and your entire onboarding flow is customized in a platform-agnostic way.

That said, whether you're working on the web or a native app, our tokens ensure your design customizations are uniformly translated. Your users will experience a consistent onboarding process, no matter where they access it from.

A glimpse into Footprint's unique solution

In the world of development, simplicity often wins. Developers are flooded with tools and platforms, each requiring time and effort to master. Introducing a new tool invariably means another documentation to read, another API to understand, and yet another set of best practices to follow. At Footprint, we understand this challenge. Our goal was not just to provide a top-notch onboarding solution but to make its adoption as seamless as possible.

Simplified customization through token-based design

Customization, while valuable, can sometimes be a double-edged sword. More options can mean more complexity. That's why we aimed for the sweet spot - deep customization without overwhelming complexity.

Customization code snippet

At the heart of our system lies the token inheritance structure. High-level tokens, such as borderRadius or colorAccent, influence a myriad of lower-level counterparts by default. This means, in many scenarios, that a few high-level tokens can dictate the design language, ensuring broad stylistic consistency across your interface. However, for those looking to delve into finer details, each lower-level token can be individually adjusted to override the general settings, allowing for precise component control.

For examples and additional details, please check our docs.

The future of onboarding customization

Our current solution allows engineering teams to quickly customize variables directly in code. While that approach is quite straightforward for engineers, and has been proven to work well, we have ambitious plans for how we want our customers to be able to customize their onboarding experience via Footprint.

For maximum flexibility, our goal is to allow anyone in the company, and not only engineers, to customize their onboarding flow as quickly and easily as possible. For that, we've been working on a concept that makes it possible for people to instantly, and visually, update any UI element of the flow. You simply click it and update anything: colors, font (family, size, weight, line height, line spacing), border radii, shadows, alignment, paddings, and more.

We're still iterating and testing the concept, but here's a sneak peek:

Get started with Footprint. Today.

If your company is looking for an onboarding solution that is customizable, seamless and secure, you can sign up for a Footprint account today. We'll be there for you every step of the way while making sure that integrating our product into yours is a breeze.

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