What I found

Business Problem

Looking at our data our Sales Manager noticed a few massive drop-offs in our Cart & Checkout flows including 48% on the Cart page and 47% on the Payment page.

THE APPROACH

How I fixed it

Hypothesis

We hypothesised that constraints such as forced Optus login and lack of payment options such as Pay Over Time caused friction for our customers. In addition to this we identified key areas where the journey didn’t reflect best practices, was clunky and could be streamlined to provide a quicker and more seamless user experience.

Measures of Success

My aim was to reduce drop-offs in our Cart & Checkout flows by at least 5%.

STEP 1

Content Audit & Recommendations

The first steps were to look at our competitors, best practices and our current state and formulate a list of recommendations for feature enhancements. After taking the developers through the list they came back with what was and wasn’t doable, for example I recommended customers have the option to take a photo of their credit card for auto-population but they advised me that it would require third party JS to capture and convert the credit card image to numbers could potentially expose our customer’s credit cards and so was rejected.

Our PO also weighed in on what was feasible and worth the time and effort to develop.

STEP 2

Ideation

I began iterating and created 4 versions and an interactive prototype.

STEP 3

Feedback & Approval

Throughout the design stage I entered into an intensive feedback cycle collecting feedback from my squad, peers and stakeholders after which I was provided with approval.

STEP 4

QA & Testing

Having briefed the developers I was provided with test links and spent a good amount of time highlighting errors and fixes. This followed by an Accessibility Usability Session where we received design feedback on any UI/UX concerns and made updates where we could.

THE SOLUTION

What I did

Some of the enhancements which I made were I:

Reviewed the steps and cut down the number of screens for the customer from 8 to 6.
Updated the UI on the cart page so that there was a consistent feel with the rest of the website and checkout.
Designed a new progress bar which allowed the customer to see at a glance where they were in the journey and provided them with the option to tap/click and edit any previous steps.
Introduced an expandable sticky nav that housed the order summary throughout the checkout journey and also provided the customer with important information such as their quantity of items and total price.
Changed the tone of voice throughout the checkout journey so that it was more conversational.
Updated the UI across the rest of the checkout journey, removing the unnecessary header and bringing all the content up.
Added product recommendations on both the Cart & Confirmation pages.

THE CHALLENGES

What I learned

After the project I reflected on the following insights:

The biggest challenge we have to face at Smart Spaces is being an e-commerce business that have the constraints of a Telco and who compete in the market against big business like JB Hi-Fi and Amazon with their polished e-comm journeys and flexible returns policies. These constraints ladder down and touch simple things across the website such as login policy and data collection which all affect the customer experience.
I also spent a lot of time investigated the many intricacies in our manual address forms to find the balance between creating a meaningful conversation with our customers whilst reducing errors in Supply Chain. It was quite a challenge liaising with SAP and I still don’t have the permission required in order to align with best practices.
Lastly due to a change of lead developer the step where I usually QA before launch wasn’t accounted for in the timeline and the product was launched before design sign-off. It was only after the soft launch that I had the opportunity to fix any development errors and as a result we couldn’t make a company announcement when planned.