When I first joined Yandex as a product designer all the way back in 2019, I knew I was joining the technological innovation ecosystem: Yandex was known as the hub for e-commerce, delivery and even cutting-edge fintech solutions. There I found one of my greatest challenges of my career so far: a deceptively simple, deeply impactful feature—the Split widget.
The Beginning of Split
Split started as a cute little feature on Yandex.Market for users to finance purchases as small monthly installments, following the well-known “buy now, pay later” pattern. At first glance, it was simple: a widget that showed up on product pages and checkout, offering users a way to spread out payments. But when I plunged into the user experience, I found that this widget did not have the clarity and usability to win over a broad audience. The offering was perfectly functional, but we were confronted by one simple problem: engagement and confidence in the product among the users simply wasn’t there yet.
Understanding the Problem
First, we tested the Split widget on a small subset of the target audience to some pretty lukewarm feedback. While some users appreciated the opportunity to split payments into installments, others were confused by the option. Phrases like “Pay 25% now” were not clear. They wanted concrete answers: “How much am I owing, exactly?” “When exactly is my next payment?” This feedback made it crystal clear that the widget wasn’t just supposed to present an option, but had to take along the user with a precise and clear process. My challenge was to take this small interface and build a tool that users would be proud to use and have wide adoption.
Reimagining the Widget
It was this time that it needed a design and functionality revamp. I worked with researchers, engineers, and stakeholders in finding pain points. The major revelation was that the mistakes being made by our competitors at both the local and international levels were using percentages and abstract terms rather than stating concrete figures. In effect, this made life worse for users who had become skeptical of installment payments in the first place. My solution was to redesign the widget with clarity top-of-mind. Instead of vague terms, we show exact amounts and payment dates. For example, instead of “Pay 25% now,” the widget would read, “Pay 2,500 RUB today, January 1; 2,500 RUB on January 15; and 2,500 RUB on January 29” and so on. This level of specificity testing showed this specificity was much more in tune with how users think about the product. They felt informed and in control, which was critical for building trust.
Scaling the Solution
When the redesign was ready, we started rolling it out incrementally. We began by showing it to 5% of Yandex.Market’s audience and closely watched user behavior and feedback. The data proved that the new widget was much more effective: users were interacting with Split more often, and they completed their purchases more often. Encouraged by these results, we gradually increased this number to 15%, then 50%, and finally to 100% of the audience of the platform. After each stage, we further refined the widget using real-world experience. By the end of 2024, hundreds of thousands of orders were being handled every day by Split, making up almost half of the total purchases on Yandex.Market.
Introducing Flexibility
As Split gained popularity, users started demanding more flexibility. They would want to choose their terms of repayment, not necessarily just taking the defaults. And that was the next iteration for Split: the user-configurable payment schedule. It might be two months, it might be 24 months—the widget adapted easily to their preference. To integrate this feature, we introduced an ML model that scored the users’ creditworthiness and set limits according to their purchasing ability, which helped us strengthen Split’s value proposition and establish it as a key driver in Yandex.Market’s success.
Overcoming Challenges
The internal alignment of different stakeholders of various teams had different priorities as to what this widget should be focused on. Some wanted it purely aesthetic, while others were for hard-selling it. And, naturally, that balance needed some active communication and data-backed argumentation. Other challenges were related to technical feasibility: the widget had to be integrated with several backend systems, including payment gateways and credit scoring algorithms. This also meant close collaboration with developers so that the design would be easy not only for end-users but could also sustain the technical weight.
The Impact
By the time we were able to implement a completely redesigned Split widget, the outcome was self-evident: the average daily volume of orders grew more than 30-fold, revenue – almost 200-fold. Transparency and ease of the widget were constantly praised by users, many of whom said it was precisely because of this widget that they chose Yandex.Market over their rivals. Incredibly, the success of Split on the Russian market spurred our competitors to deploy their own BNPL programs, which meant our solution was a welcome development on the market. We felt good about doing something right, but it also challenged us to do more. Since then, we’ve worked hard to introduce more features like virtual cards and promo campaigns.
Reflections
The redesign journey of the Split widget is, with hindsight, one of the most rewarding stories in my career—learning to listen to users, collaborating across disciplines, and keeping a commitment to clarity and simplicity. What was a small feature became the cornerstone of Yandex’s FinTech strategy, proof that even the tiniest design decisions can make a huge difference. I am excited about the future products we can build upon Split’s successful foundation that will further empower our users through clever design. But for now, I’m proud to contribute to the transformation of something that was just a simple widget into a product that changed the game for the company itself.
