Walmart labs eCommerce

What I did here

My work focus on Walmart Grocery MX cart to the checkout process. I was involved in the whole end to end process designing the experience for the customer. 

Come up with a clear definition with Mission Statement and a Vision Statement for the product. Set up meetings and brainstorming sessions with Product Partners, Engineering Leads, UX Counterparts, Content Strategist & Research Partners. 
Define the Goals & Success criteria for the project. Work with the product manager to define the goals, understand the current metrics numbers.
Work with the research team to understand Customer Segmentation & Personas, and then conduct a Competitive Study, understand the business competitors and market trends. Work on preliminary Survey to figure out what users want, think and expect during the checkout process. On parallel work on detailed Heuristic Evaluation of checkout flow in collaboration with research and design team.
Create an Experience Map for cart & checkout flow and synthesize it with Empathy Map.
Collaborate with stakeholders through design studios and design workshops to Conceptualize Ideas, come up with multiple concepts and Wireframes. Work with content strategist to finalize content.
Finalize wireframes and run a quick User Test. Gather feedback from user test and improvize designs. Iterate on designs and re-test with customers. Created a final click-through prototype for the final usability test. Analyze final test results and finalize the design and specs. Hand over final Specs to the dev team. Create Animations for interaction details.

Problem

95% of customers abandon their cart during the checkout process when using the Walmart grocery MX. 

40% abandonment in the step1 (Pickup/delivery); 90% abandonment in step 2 (Preview); 80% for step 3 (Payment).

Customers find it “hard to remove items in cart” and therefore abandon order instead of starting order from scratch.

Customers complain that grocery delivery is usually late.

Customers abandon cart after finding out the timeslot they selected earlier in the journey is no longer available.

UX Goal & Success

Mainly takeaways

I ask myself every day, what I learned today in work and write those down

1. Always ask for help from other designers

Always ask for help if you need something if you need an icon, ask for the team if someone already has it, if you need some feedback about your design asks for it. Actually, during my internship, I conduct several meeting with designers from a different team to let them know what I'm working on, getting feedback about how they think and what'll they do when they facing the same problem and sharing ideas about what I'll do to solve the problem.

2. Use meeting as a tool to make your design better

Unlike doing design projects at school, in the real-world, there's always so many meetings you need to attend, especially with PM and engineers. If you schedule the meeting, have a plan in mind, that will save a lot of time for both of you. Always try to document the key points, especially when PM is talking about the requirements. You are not the only designer, trying to use all the resources, run design studio effectively.

3. Thinking about the problem try to solve and the context first, not the idea first

When doing designs, designers trends to have a visual screen in mind, trying to get rid of that. Getting the data from the real user and trying to talking to the user at an early stage. Trying to understand their habit and pain point, thinking about different scenarios and context. When I'm doing the cart and check out process for Groceries, I find it's very different from the general merchandise, especially the way they show 'edit quantity' in the cart, edit quantity is a very important feature for them, they might buy a large amount for one item, thus the way to edit the quantity should be very straight forward instead of click and expand. 

4. Take feedback wisely

You're the owner of your project, you know your project than anyone else, people will have different kind of it’s up to you to take the feedback or not. Nowadays everyone has an idea on design, everyone can be a 'designer', you need to think about your contexts 

 5. Convincing others of your ideas is an important skill to learn

In real life design, you might have the right ideas, but convincing others that your ideas are right is a skillset. If you have different opinions with your PM about the experience, try to find the intention, trying to understand why they’re saying that, if it's still didn’t find a good solution, trying to bring another designer into the conversation. If you think the decision is going to the bad design you should push not to being there. Find examples and reasons why you are doing this instead of that, and document different iterations you made so that you’re prepared when others ask you “have you ever tried this kind of solution or that kind of design?”.

6. A good designer should always switch between your thinking globally and locally

When doing the design, not just thinking about how’s this page look like, thinking for about how will the interaction will be, thinking about what will the page looks like when it’s the first time user, what it will look like when it is a returning user or advanced user. Thinking about what will the interaction look like. (sometimes if you just focus on the single page you’ll be boxed in the page even don’t noticed the flow error) Thinking both globally and locally, the good designer needs to switch in between these two modes.

7. When doing design, thinking about the 'worst' situation 

Unlike Just like the text on the page, in the real world, there will be situations the text is extremely long or extremely short which will influence the design a lot. There's always lots of things that will constrain your design decisions - don't be frustrated! This is your chance that can use your thinking to solve it!

Thanks for Watching 

Are you Looking for designers that passionate about converting complex problems into meaningful experiences?

If so, let's get in touch! Feel free to shot me a line: shiwen3795@gmail.com