Shippo Case Study
Merchant Order Management
The goal of the Shippo is to become the shipping layer of the internet. Many e-commerce merchants struggle in fulfilling their online orders cheaply and efficiently, and Shippo needed to be the one-stop to visualize, organize, and fulfill many orders with as little clicks as possible, for any type of small-business. Another goal was to be the thought-leader in online fulfillment, so that merchants become aware of extra features like returns, parcel insurance, and international shipping gracefully as they grow their business.
Field research participant 1
Field research participant 2
Field research participant 3
I created a value map of the needs of the merchant, aligned to the jobs of Shippo, as well as the goals of the product.
I tested a concept with low fidelity online prototypes to understand what is self-discoverable and completed without guidance for non-Shippo and existing Shippo customers. The goal was to create a vision for the Orders page that eases the understanding of fulfillment for new users, as well as reducing frustration for existing users.
Consolidation and reduction of business flows to one responsive, modular pattern that progressively provides useful details with increased screen real estate
Concept testing
Upon initial launch in 2022, this project launched on Shippo.com in three phases, with iterative monitoring and customer interviews until final release. Additional learnings from new users and high-volume merchants challenge the viability of this new flow, which is the current focus of 2023.
Concurrent to this project was to improve the Design and Development process by creating a comprehensive Figma Design System, matched by a component library managed in Chromatic. The design system’s priority was simplicity and reusability, extending and matching the customer mental model.
Molecule example, constructed with reusable buttons and forms
Organisms example, taking lower level molecules and arranging them to cover all business flows
Specification of breakpoints utilizing the same organisms and molecules to ensure parity of features in all screen sizes
Amazon Case Study 1
Pay by transfer
The goal of the Amazon Pay By Transfer Project was to create a way for customers who are accustomed to pay via secure transfer of funds for purchases on Amazon Retail. Pay by transfer was a common way to pay for Polish, Dutch, and Belgian customers, and was a stark difference for Americans paying with credit that is easily reversible. In contrast, these customers’ shopping journeys are highly meditated, and require a lot of trust for this payment method to be used once.
Warsaw participants 🇵🇱
Amsterdam participants 🇳🇱
Brussels participants 🇧🇪
I created a high level journey to synthesize and prioritize the most urgent customer frustrations to improve for the first version of payment by transfer experience for Amazon Retail. This journey also defined the must-haves for this feature to earn the trust of new customers, as Amazon is a new retailer in their countries.
I also made sure to accommodate the wide variety of bank and verification styles
Pure app interactions
Dual-device payment verification
Personal Card and Token generator
I iterated and tested a new-to-Amazon polling page, animation and interval for Pay-by-transfer customer to comfortably complete payment on their device while initiating purchases on desktop.
Since the chance for payment failure is increased (compared to credit cards) it was also important to give customers paths to the most successful payment-by-transfer experience, which was mobile. Thus, the final and primary experience was mobile-first, and all error scenarios asked customers to complete payment on the most secure platform, their phone.
These experiences were tested across major Polish, Dutch, and Belgium banks to ensure a high bar across banks that had varied mobile experiences.
Upon launch in 2016, this project challenged the North American shopping and payment journey, and exposed assumptions that didn’t internationalize well to other markets. Given the increased exposure to payment failures and how successful payments are integral to fast delivery to customers, it was crucial to solve this problem for any and all forms of payment failures. With payment-by-transfer, I designed a more general pay-at-the end experience that ensured focus, and inline payment recovery to ensure transparency to the customer and a more guaranteed status of payment and order upon completion.
Amazon Case Study 2
Pay by invoice
The goal of the Amazon Pay By Invoice Project was to create a way for customers who are accustomed to pay after receipt of products via a Amazon-consolidated monthly bill. Pay by invoice was a common way to pay for Swiss and German customers, and was a stark difference for Americans paying with credit that is easily reversible. In contrast, these customers’ shopping journeys are flexible, and many exchanges, refunds, and returns occur before the final payment of purchases.
Swiss participants 🇨🇭
German participants 🇩🇪
German participants 🇩🇪
After studying current pay-by-invoice customers, I took inventory of the needed artifacts for a successful pay-by-invoice experience on Amazon.
The paper experience was expected for existing invoice customers, but not without frustrations. Losing a paper invoice was costly to customers, and paper invoices tend to get disorganized as customers increase purchases across different retailers with different monthly due dates.
Invoice slip and Bank scanning experience
German invoice variations
Swiss manual post-office invoice payment methods
Thus, I set off on a challenge to design a digital-first, monthly consolidated Invoice for all purchases digital or physical across of Amazon. There were examples of this already in the industry, both inside and outside Amazon, so I made sure to leverage on strengths of existing solutions while emphasizing the major information needed for smaller screens.
Existing German (by request only) Physical Invoice
Pay after concept
Local competitors consolidating invoices across local online retailers (Klarna)
The design of the monthly invoice page includes states of not paid, and paid, with corresponding schedules of in-app notifications alerting them of major events like invoice close, 3 days before invoice due (the amount of time for the slowest payment method - bank transfer - to complete without fees), and the delightful conclusion: paid.
The final design of the monthly invoice page needed to be a consolidated page that gave customers confidence of what was purchased, the running total, when it was due, and how to pay.
Desktop customers can also replicate a paper-like experience if they print their invoices from the website.
Customers appreciated the clear division of products bought in a month and payment information, which felt to them as flexible and comfortable as the payment method itself. Other invoices lead with the payment information, which customers found pushy.
Project showcase
Amazon Verify
The goal of the Amazon Verify project was to conceptualize a way for customers to increase security and confidence without slowing the purchase flow. This was also a proof-of-concept design to test the viability of enabling Alexa as a secure agent.
Winner of 2018 Payments Hackathon
This was a collaboration with the Alexa Organization, and helped communicate the use case of Alexa needing to verify unique customers from their voice.
Project showcase
Amazon Cash
The goal of the Amazon Cash project was increase access of Amazon Retail to 51M underbanked and 16M unbanked population. Amazon had silently marginalized customers who don’t want or didn’t have the ability to pay with credit cards or debit cards, and I designed the interface in the project’s effort to unlock Amazon for these customers.
Here, a customer who didn’t want to use cards can instead store a cash balance in their Amazon account to use for purchases. This balance can be reloaded at an increasing number of physical locations, but found with user research that 80% of the time, the customer will be using one familiar location, so it was important to be able to export the barcode for easy access outside of the shopping app.