THE CHALLENGE
After Yankee Candle going through a major website redesign in the summer of 2018, Yankee Candle needed to grow new traffic sources and improve their site conversion. Due to the shift from the desktop to mobile traffic, Yankee Candle needed a user friendly design that converted the traffic and increase page load.
Services Provided
Ecommerce
UX Research
WHAT I DID
Yankee Candle's checkout was a mutli-step checkout process increased the likelihood of abandonment & fatigue. In order to improve the checkout experience I needed to first understand the pain points and what wasn't working well. Through various data sources such as Biz Rate feedback, analyatics, & UX research I started to get a better picture of the shortcomings that faced YC's checkout. The solution was to create a single page checkout to remain compettive in the fragrnance space. Although YC is well known for its strong brand presence I needed to elevate the checkout to be up to par with what the brand respresented.
Wonderful products - good sale pricing - cumbersome and confusing checkout process
-Yankee Candle DTC Customer
RESEARCH METHOLOGY
I collaborated with the research team on the unmoderated usability test for cart & checktout. This test allowed cross-functional teams to understand consumer pain points and glean on qualitative findings.
The Research team ran an unmoderated study with 10 participants; 5 desktop and 5 smartphone to answer the following research questions:
- What is confusing or unclear when adding an item to the cart and checking out?
- Do participants understand how to add multiple addresses in the cart and check out?
- What is unclear or missing in the cart and checkout process?
- Do mobile participants encounter any pain points in the cart or checkout as a result of the responsive design?
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
Being able to hear what consumers were thinking during the test vs where their mouse clicked on provided a deeper level of apprecation as you're able to empathize with the problems they're facing. Amoungst various insights 3 main issues surfaced.
Participants were confused by how promotions were applied in the mini cart & cart
Participants were confused by pricing terminology differences in the mini-cart & cart
Participants expected to add multiple shipping address during checkout and not in the cart
SOLUTION
The overall solution was one that solved and addressed the user's pain points based on the findings from the usability test. By removing these pain points it reduced the friction and allowed the checkout experience to be more seamless.
APPLYING CONSUMER FEEDBACK
On the next Sprint I quickly actioned on solving for the promotion, inconsistencies and the multi-ship to funcitioanlity. This gave Yankee Candle the cutting edge that it needed to reduce checkout abandoment.
In order to provide consistency and reduce ambiguity around promotions, I carried over the same treatment throughout PLP, Mini-Cart, Cart & Checkout. I enhanced the savings by distiguishing sale, unit and previous pricing.
The Yankee Candle brand is predominantly a gifiting company. By taking the feedback from consumers, I placed the multi-shipping method within checkout. A functionality that was carried over from the multi-step checkout to the reskin of checkout.
BEFORE & AFTER
20,000 FOOT VIEW
When working on a complex area of the site as checkout, it will take dozens of iterations. Here is a view of all the wireframes I produced for Yankee Candle's Single Page Checkout.
RESULTS
In Q1 of the months of January - February, US overall had a completion rate of +5.5% over the previous verion. Desktop completion rate increased by +1.7% while mobile increased +6.9% and contributed to ~2.5M. This was Newell's first single-page checkout which became the model that the other brands followed after.
+22.5%
increase in completion rate
+9%
in revenue conversion
WHAT I LEARNED
There are many factors that contribute to checkout abandoment. For example, extra costs, account creation barriers, long & tedious checkout process, delivery issues and even a slow site are notorious for creating unecessary friction on any checkout experience. The key is to get a better understanding of consumer's pain points and be able to empthasize with what they are going through. The most valuable lesson I learned from the single-page checkout project is that you need both qualitative & qualitve research in order to solve the right problem. Without research, it can be a challenge to improve any experience.