Introduction

As Canada’s oldest and longest standing company, the Bay is a purpose led, e-commerce retailer and marketplace. Their mission is to help Canadians live their best style of life.

Team

Major Home Fashion/Furnishings

Role

Lead Product Designer

Objective

Enhance the front-end purchasing experience for customers

Outcome

Increased overall conversion by 11.27% in the first six months

Tools

Figma, Figjam, Jira/Confluence, Usertesting.com, Baymard Institute

The Problem(s)

There were constant check-ins with our internal stakeholders and the end goal was to give the major home fashion customer experience a massive, digital facelift with a shortened initial release date.

Discovery revealed several key problems from a front-end UX perspective. These included:

• A product details page that was consistent for regular, “sold by the Bay” and “marketplace” items but was wildly different for major home fashion (MHF) items
  
  

• Quantitative empirical data indicating that there was a select few customers who couldn’t proceed with checkout due to being “out-of-zone” for deliveries and needed to use a different postal code

  
  

• Zero visibility for estimated delivery date of MHF items

• Furniture under the “sold by the bay” category required customers to call their nearest store and conduct a purchase through an associate whereas furniture filtered by marketplace sellers could be directly added to cart online

• An outdated checkout flow that used older logic, was unintuitive for MHF items and didn’t clearly distinguish fees and delivery tiers

• An obsolete order confirmation email template in the company’s database that did not account for MHF items

Customer Journey Map

This journey map was a shared artifact for the business to gain alignment on the end-to-end current state journey for major home fashion purchases.

Competitive Analysis

We knew what needed to be done, but what are others doing?

General Themes

• Providing a means of getting richer information

• Easily understandable information

• Contextual information

Proposals & Agile Releases

Product Details Page Revamp

A revamp to the product details page (PDP) was proposed, to include major home fashion (MHF) item specifications by maintaining consistency with the look and feel of regular non-MHF item PDPs.

Issue

Outdated and clunky

Users reported:

• Not having enough info displayed on the product details page

• Product thumbnail extending below the fold and occupying way too much scrolling real estate

• Reviews and ratings not readily accessible above the fold

• The inability to “add to bag” was a HUGE detriment as calling in to the nearest store and speaking to an associate opened up a slew of issues

• Product details feeling like they were just slapped on the page in one giant text block (with a high likelihood of missing out key details due to information overload)

• Shipping and returns policy being hidden and not available upfront

• Inability to pair other products with their chosen furniture or shop for pieces within the same collection

• Not having the fit guide readily available to see if the furniture would fit their living accommodations

• Poor customization options for made-to-order furniture

Estimated Delivery Date

Another major initiative that implemented quickly was estimated delivery date. More specifically, estimated delivery date (EDD) for MHF items was ported over from non-MHF items on top of same-day delivery (SDD).

Solution

Postal Code Validation Check

Data revealed to us that around 2% of our customers were “out-of-zone” for deliveries meaning that they would either not be delivered to or would incur an additional fee.

Seeing as upper management’s OKR was to only allow for in-zone deliveries at the time, I designed three variations of a postal code validation check within the checkout flow and after further testing, arrived on a final design if an out-of-zone use case kicked in (albeit extremely rare).

If a customer’s postal code was deemed “out-of-zone” they would subsequently have to remove the MHF item(s) in question to proceed with checkout.

Link to all three prototype flows

After testing three flows with users, one design received ~90% majority approval for its intuitiveness and simplicity (see flow 2 in prototype link).

We were concerned that customers would want more info explaining what “OOZ” meant but users who typically fell into this category seemed to know that they were unable to make the purchase

Instead, the main recommendation we received was to allow for BOPIS (buy online and pick up in store) when it came to MHF items so that even if the customer couldn’t get the item delivered, they could come to the nearest store to pick it up.

Modernized Checkout Flow

Users reported 77% satisfaction with our checkout process when purchasing non-MHF items but only 52% satisfaction when checking out with MHF items in their cart.

To bridge the gap, the checkout flow was modernized for MHF. The seamless integration of a smarter checkout engine that would accurately display a mixed bag (MHF items added to shopping bag with other “Sold by the Bay” or “Marketplace” items) was implemented and ship-to-home deliveries with a flat shipping fee were also highlighted.

Mixed Bag Proposal

Link to Prototype

Progressive Disclosure

• Testing revealed that 61% of MHF customers preferred a mixed bag over a split bag (non-MHF items and MHF items)

No BOPIS (Buy Online, Pickup In Store)

• We made it clear to customers that MHF items could only be shipped to homes for delivery and couldn’t be picked up from stores

Flat Shipping Fee

• We also wanted to highlight that a flat fee of $74.99 was applied to MHF purchases (regardless of the number of MHF items in bag)

Promising Engine Deployment

Link to Prototype

The tech team deployed a new promising engine which was basically a “smarter” checkout engine than our previous one (that used outdated logic). The integration of this new engine meant I could design for divided shipping methods for both non-MHF and MHF items and also by delivery type.

As such, the shopping bag now displayed a mixed bag rather than a split bag when having multiple items under both “Sold by the Bay” and “Marketplace” categories.

Update Order Confirmation Email

Knowing that MHF currently wasn’t accounted for in post-purchase information, an updated order confirmation email that included MHF-specific details was constructed.

Default

Our confirmation email templates were automated and generated by a database. However, the database didn’t account for MHF items at all.

As a result, if the customer only had MHF item(s) in their final purchase, sometimes they would not receive an order confirmation email at all.

Updated

Below is a key showing where amendments were made. The final prototype on the right portrays an updated order confirmation email accounting for all post-purchasing information upon an MHF item(s) being purchased.

Respective additional fees, a furniture fit guide, customer terms & conditions, customer care center details and a scheduled delivery reminder are all included to help alleviate pressure off our customer care center but also provide a solid reference material for the customer should any future problems arise.

Link to Prototype

Internal Feedback

• Ultimately, there were many deliverables proposed but leadership wanted to be laser focused on changes that would help make MHF digitally transactional and enable easier shopping from end to end.

• Timeline was shortened and some deliverables were de-prioritized at different times.

• SteerCo’s (steering committee meetings) were an opportunity for the product and tech teams to present updates and pivot if upper management changed their mind on certain things.

Next Initiatives

3PL (Third Party Logistics) Provider

Upper management is in ongoing discussions with a third party logistics provider to handle our shipping logistics, which means that some of the order confirmation email copy surrounding scheduled delivery would need to be edited down the line.

The highlighted areas on the left illustrates the copy in question that would be amended based on our conversations with the 3PL provider.

If we decided not to go with the 3PL provider, generating emails for scheduled delivery would fall under my purview.

Service-Based Delivery Tiers

View in Showroom

Something that was floated as an afterthought was the ability to view furniture at showrooms at Bay stores.

The idea came about when someone mentioned Macy’s, Leon’s and some of our competitors having the ability to view furniture in an augmented virtual reality space.

Augmented reality was ruled out by us due to low tech feasibility and significant slow down on site speed and performance.

Competitors who did not use AR opted to instead let the customer know which stores had select furniture on display.

Returns, Damages & Exchanges

On the Orders & Returns page, how might we display to our shoppers the process to initiate a return, damages or exchanges?

At the moment, the company only offers returns online (we don’t offer exchanges digitally). MHF items would not show up on the O&R page so how would it look?

Upper management and the tech team notified me that shoppers would still need to initiate a return by calling into the call center despite being such a legacy process.

For the first iteration of these designs, I’d probably think of tackling returns first (since pursuant to our conversations with the 3PL provider, the view of the page could look different and the tech team would need to adjust).

The design on the right was made in ad-hoc collaboration with the returns team to maintain consistency with their O&R page redesign for non-MHF items.

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