WordPress.com checkout: 2019

Role

As the design lead on this project, my responsibilities included research, design, prototyping, usability testing, front-end development, and product management.

Problem

When I was asked to join this project, very little work had been done to determine what was actually wrong with our checkout. All we knew was that we were updating our technological infrastructure and that this presented us an opportunity to update the design as well.

Approach

With the little information we had at the outset, I proposed that we started with a research spike to understand the challenges we were facing. Over a two week period I conducted the following activities: stakeholder interviews, data analysis, competitor review, and surveys. The data I collected gave us a clear sense of where we were falling short and helped us identify some possible directions to improve the design.

Equipped with this information, I put together a comprehensive project brief that highlighted our goals, metrics, and launch plan. I also began sketching different approaches, with a mobile first mindset, and shared them with folks from across the company. I went through a couple rounds of feedback and iterating before moving into higher fidelity mockups which included desktop designs. Within the span of another two weeks, I had a design that was good enough to start prototyping and testing.

The prototype not only helped us collect feedback from our customers but also helped in the development process. It provided us a source of truth to work through various interactions and let us experiment with some of the latest front-end technology. As the developers worked their magic on all things back end, I played a crucial role building out parts of the front-end. This gave the developers the opportunity to focus on bigger, more complex tasks while I sweated the details. Our combined efforts helped the project proceed more rapidly.

Outcome

After 2 months of A/B testing, and a roller coaster of emotions, we were able to increase our overall purchase rate by 5% globally. Digging into more specifics, we saw our biggest gains on mobile where we increased conversions by 27%.