Problem/Brief:

As the share of online shopping orders shipped grows and grows, the capacity of delivery carriers to be able to handle merchant demand for 'last mile' home deliveries will plateau. In order to maintain a high level of service and reduce costs for customers, it became a matter of strategic importance to try and incentivize customers to shift away from exclusively home delivery, and instead explore different delivery network options. To that end, in 2018 Zalando onboarded a new carrier that facilitated next-day delivery to certain pick up point shops (PuPs). Because only certain shops were included in the network, the challenge became how to integrate the new selection into the checkout and give customers the right level of information to make an informed choice about the delivery of their order. The goal of the project was to increase the pick up point adoption rate, as well as increasing customer NPS by offering a premium delivery service for free.

Result:

The launch of the first and second phases resulted in an over 50% increase in pick up point adoption rate in our key market (France). The most significant share of the increase came from the first stage of implementation when we decided to make no front end changes, and rather I suggested a UX change to the logic of the page that would default the customer to the pick up point flow, increasing traffic to this page as the first step. The next iteration of this feature will be to include it as part of Zalando's premium membership service.

Process:

When checkout team was approached with a request to include a new delivery carrier in the address step of the flow, I had many questions about the requesting team's proposed solution. It seemed to be based on the most straightforward technical implementation rather than a solution derived from customer insights, and involved creating a completely separate map view for the new carrier. As we were under time pressure to align with a planned marketing campaign, I started exploring several different design options, including the solutions they had proposed; however, product and engineering from both teams had difficulty agreeing on the right direction. I suggested that we try validating the designs with customers in order to unblock the process. The other team had never worked with user research before and the process was new to them, but by collaborating with a researcher to draft a plan, I eventually got their buy-in to run the tests. We did two rounds of testing and 3 rounds of iterations before the first launch, which drew all of the stakeholders into a collaborative process.

Our research showed that comprehension of the offering was aided by customers' awareness of the carrier brand's USP. Therefore in the second phase, we included branding elements to reinforce the proposition. We implemented a map view showing both sets of pick up points, differentiated by colour, along with default logic to filter by for the speedy carrier.

Because the project required significant technical alignment between the teams, I saw it as a major part of my role as designer to facilitate these conversations by providing materials for discussions. These included user journey mapping exercises, creating whiteboarding matrixes for mapping technical requirements, and visualising how technical decisions would impact the end customer experience. This was carried out in several different workshop sessions, across two quarters, and involving stakeholders from 4 different product and engineering teams.

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