Hypothesis

By enhancing post-purchase communications to provide users with greater visibility into their order and updates on important changes, we believe customer satisfaction will increase leading to higher customer retention.

Results

• Increased NPS score from 6.1 to 7.9 (23% increase)
• Reduced customer contacts for substitutions by 68% resulting in $600K annual savings
• Released to 2,000+ stores

Project Organization

I approached this project by breaking it into two key initiatives. The first was the communication element, where I collaborated with the copy team to design messaging for each touchpoint and created design comps for SMS, email, and push notifications. The second initiative focused on the substitution experience, where I worked to adapt the mobile design to responsive web formats, ensuring a seamless experience across platforms.

Information Architecture

I mapped out the end-to-end flow, to identify the key touch points where we need to contact the customer about substitutions. A guiding principle of this project was to find the balance between providing customers with clear, timely updates at crucial moments, without sending too many notifications which would result in fatigue.

Competitive Analysis

Without sufficient user data and tight timeline, I leveraged competitive analysis to inform the first iteration. I analyzed existing industry patterns to establish a streamlined design that aligns with best practices. As users engage with the feature, we will gather insights to refine the experience to better meet their needs.

Iterative Design

Users needed a clear way to see which items were substituted and what they were replaced with, along with a strong call-to-action for easy decision-making. Transparency was key, so I prioritized showing detailed item info upfront to build trust. After rounds of ideation, and alignment with stakeholders, I prepared two conceptual figma prototypes that solved our problem.

Iteration #1: Scrollable List

In the first iteration, substitutions were displayed in a scrollable list, allowing users to review and act on each item quickly. This worked well for a typical order which averaged 6 substitutions.

Iteration #2: Focused List

In the second iteration, I explored a focused list, displaying one substitution at a time to decrease the amount of information they needed to digest. This design restricted visibility into all substitutions at once.

Usability Test

Usability Test I collaborated with our UX researcher to these two iterations with real users (12 users who ordered from Albertsons 1-4 times a week). Research showed that both concepts scored well in usability, but users preferred the list view for seeing all substitutions at once. After incorporating user feedback, we finalized the designs, gained stakeholder approval, and shipped.

• In the pilot store (2) launch, we saw 53.2% adoption rate of the substitutions feature and $2,538 total gain on rejections, which we expect to scale when the feature releases to all stores
• Customer Approved Substitutions feature expanded to 2,000+ e-commerce stores later that year resulting in an Increased NPS score from 6.1 to 7.9 (23%), and Reduced customer contacts for substitutions by 68% resulting in $600K annual savings

What I Learned

What I learned One difficult aspect of this project was working within the archaic communication templates, which were incredibly restrictive, and required multiple rounds of review across different teams. First, it was important to understand that sometimes you are not equipped to deliver the best possible solution. Knowing this, I took the time to collaborate with my partners to understand how these systems worked in order to deliver the best experience within these constraints. This empathy laid the foundation for effective collaboration, and set us up for success.