CASE STUDY

One-Page Checkout

Reducing cognitive load to increase conversion.

StickerGiant’s existing checkout was based on a theme but wasn’t designed for our products or experience. This was a project with a rapid timeline to go live where I collaborated with our front-end engineers on design, scope, and features in a UX agile process throughout development.

Role

UX Design

Responsibilities

Strategic Vision
Discovery/Competitive Analysis
Wireframes & Prototypes
Design Reviews

Timeframe

JAN – FEB 2024

Problem

StickerGiant’s existing checkout was two long pages that forced the user to scroll through unnecessary information resulting in checkout abandonment and high bounce rates. Long load times also contributed to this so a custom solution built by our internal engineers was needed.

Challenge

How do we show the user the information required for each step of the checkout process without displaying all input fields on page load?

Discovery

I started a FigJam board for cross-functional discovery between engineering, product, and design to post checkout experiences of our competitors and top e-commerce brands. My goal was to lead our teams to empathize with customers and meet their expectations. What are our customers used to when checking out on Shopify sites, Amazon, or VistaPrint? Which payment experiences instill trust? Another goal was to align design opinions and preferences.

Collapsible sections to guide the user.

In order to guide the user through checkout inputs, I designed collapsible sections for each step of the process. I identified four main sections of Contact, Address, Delivery, and Payment.

Delivery and Shipping Speed

Our cross-functional team assumed that the percentage of local pickup orders was under 2% due to orders placed throughout North America. In reality, the percentage was closer to 10% because of our strong local presence and speed without shipping.

Instead of primarily showing pickup for all customers or hiding it as a secondary option, we built conditional logic into the flow from the address to personalize checkout. If an address was local, pickup would display as an additional option. A learning here was to make data-driven decisions to help solve a problem or inform the interaction of a feature.

Previous experience showed the carrier (UPS, Fedex, USPS) but it was confusing and caused too much cognitive load. We knew that the customer was only concerned with speed and price, so as a solution we opted to remove the carrier and show simplified, useful information only.

Display the customer artwork

At StickerGiant, the customer artwork is the product. The previous checkout didn’t show an artwork thumbnail so we added thumbnails as secondary in the order summary.

Feedback for the user at the most sensitive points in the journey.

Green checks to show successful inputs and dynamic error messaging for sensitive information.

Improving Accessibility

I collaborated with our design shop to identify WCAG interaction colors to incoporate with our refreshed brand for copy, success, error states, and CTAs.

 

  • WCAG brand colors
  • Hyperlinks underlined
  • Rounded corners on buttons and form fields
  • Increased font size
  • Contrast checkers

Impact

Decreasing cognitive load for users, simplifying the journey, and designing with accessibility in mind reinforced future thinking and UX best practices at StickerGiant for custom solutions. Since cross-functional teams were involved in discovery, they were aligned with the outcome of this new strategy.

Results

35%

decrease in cognitive load

23%

increase in confirmation dialogs

54%

decrease in page load times

Design System