Patagonia
Improving Canadian customers’ checkout experience.
Design Modification: patagonia.ca checkout
The goal of this redesign was to improve customers’ checkout and overall ordering experience on patagonia.ca, and lessen the workload of customer service and order management teams. I used a combination of quantitative data and feedback for research, and Figma for wireframing, designing, and prototyping.
Role
UX Designer, UX Researcher
Team
self-directed
Client
Patagonia (potential)
I observed that many of Patagonia’s Canadian customers choose to ship their orders to their PO boxes, yet the shipping carrier used can’t make those deliveries, and this is not clear during the checkout process.
Because of this, orders must be manually adjusted, sometimes involving multiple departments’ hands and leading to delays in customers getting their orders, or, worse, cancelled orders. Yikes!
My goal was to find a way to communicate this shipping restriction to customers before they place an order, resulting in an improved customer experience, and reduced workload for Patagonia employees.
Problem Statement
After joining the Order Review team and learning all the steps that must be taken when a Canadian order comes through with a PO box, I asked my manager if any suggestions had been made to alert customers not to use their PO box.
While I was told some ideas had been previously proposed, I was prompted to present a new approach, focusing on messaging and minimal dev changes.
Research:
I used a combination of reports generated from outreach logs (Excel), cancellation reports (Microsoft D365 and Excel), as well as customer and employee feedback to quantify the impact of the unclear shipping restrictions and gain insight into customers’ feelings about the process, and workload impact for employees.
The following data represents a 3 month period between November 2021 and February 2022, a high-volume period for the company.
* time spent reviewing Canadian orders that were submitted with a PO Box, and manually sending email to customer. Not including the time spent adjusting orders once customer responded, average 3-4 minutes per order.
**total product value cancelled due to not hearing from customer. Does not include losses due to negative customer experience.
“I didn’t know I couldn’t ship to my personal mail box.”
“I just spent 20 minutes fixing this order!”
“You can just cancel the order, it’s not going to arrive in time.”
Ideation and Research
From my experience in customer service, I knew that in most cases, messaging just needs to be loud and clear. The use of bold red notice grabs the customer’s attention and knowing that this technique has been successfully implemented in the past, I felt that it was the most straightforward way to communicate the point.
I chose to add an unselected radio button for the shipping option. Although there is only one shipping option for Canadian customers, they will not be able to move forward without selecting it, drawing their attention to the bold messaging.
A new drop-down section housed with the “FAQ” and “Need Assistance?” tabs will provide more nuanced details about the shipping capabilities. Since this information does not apply to all customers, only a very small percentage, the bold messaging will target most users, and those who are an exception know who they are.
Solution
Go ahead, I’m interactive!
This project was presented to a small team who is often on the “clean up” end of the Canadian PO Box issue, and then passed along to the company’s web team for consideration. As of October 2022, the website now prevents users from checking out with a PO Box.
Impact:
Taking insights from November 2022-February 2023, the same time period from before the design and web team implemented a preventative measure, numbers show this change had a positive impact on the customer experience, business profits, and employee productivity.
*total product value cancelled due to not hearing from customer. Does not include losses due to negative customer experience.
Overall, I feel satisfied with how this project turned out. If I had the time and resources, I would have liked to partner with the insight team to collect more data, conduct user testing on my designs, and also speak with the dev team to have a better understanding of what options were discussed and ruled out, and what would be possible to get into production.
A future version of this design might include messaging to direct customers to select the radio button.
