CLIENT: Etsy
CHALLENGE: Redesign order management experience that 2 million Etsy sellers use every day to fulfill their orders
MY ROLE: User research, Journey Mapping, Prototyping
Old orders page was not meeting diversifying seller needsCHALLENGE
APPROACH
OUTCOME
Redesign of the order managing experience had to happen for inter-woven problems coming from the user, technology, business, and visual design needs. Our sellers' businesses had grown with Etsy, but the old setup was not optimized to take care of their diversifying needs.
Old code resulted in slower developing time and prevented us from quickly iterating on adding new features to help both sellers' and Etsy’s business to expand. From a purely visual perspective, the old style didn’t feel like a holistic product experience within Etsy.
We ran Etsy’s first design sprint, visited sellers' workplaces, analyzed data, and spoke with the customer support team to truly understand the root problem and core needs of our users. The product goal was to streamline the whole experience to reduce unnecessary time spent on managing orders. The less time and effort sellers spend on our platform, the more they could spend creating what they love. Our success matrix included time spent on managing orders and reducing overdue orders and unfulfilled orders.
Introduced a new concept of ‘Progress step’ that helps sellers to keep track of the order status, and it was well received. Some real use case includes: ‘Awaiting response,’ ‘Painting,’ and ‘Ready to ship.’
Clarifying the ‘Ship by date’ countdown and adding 'Filters' reduced the number of overdue orders by 7%.
Proved that clear UX contributes to the revenue increase through increased shipping label attach rates.
NEW ORDERS EXPERIENCE
Clarified the hierarchy of the information and contextualized it to emphasize relevant information at the right moment without visually overwhelming sellers. After iterations, I created a modular design system that can flexibly communicate lots of information. This approach also made it easier to collaborate with engineers because we were able to structure the design and code base similarly.
Tracking module shows the latest status of the order. Emphasizing ship by date resulted in decreasing overdue orders significantly.
DESIGN PROCESS
Design sprint
A design sprint was a great way to build a shared understanding of the product, especially with non-designers and decision-makers in the team. Through bouncing off ideas and conducting user testing with sellers in 5 days, we found common themes around the need for better ways of organizing orders. The early concept of 'Progress steps' came out from the design sprint.
User Journey Mapping: The first step was to build empathy with users and get familiar with the old tool. Based on past research findings, I created a user journey map and shared sellers' pain points and wishlists with the team.
Design decision-making criteria throughout the process were to add requested new key features, keep things familiar for things that are working well, fix broken elements, and remove unused features.
I made decisions based on data analysis, qualitative research, usability testing, and team discussions.
Seller studio visit
As part of the design sprint, we visited a seller's workplace and observed real people beyond the screen. There was an elderly retired couple who will print out all the order details because they had to squint to read small texts on the screen, a pregnant woman who wanted to spend the least amount of time in front of computers, and a tech-savvy young lady who coded an incredible dashboard by herself to track and organize orders.
Iterative phase & launch - my typical week:
On Monday, I started by meeting with the PM and discussing the requirements of the feature that our team will be working on during the next sprint.
On Tuesday I usually focused on getting an early sketch done.
On Wednesday, I went over wireframes with engineers, a copywriter, a PM and a QA specialist on my team and received valuable feedback from diverse perspectives.
On Thursdays, I had a design crit session with designers across teams.
On Fridays, I finalized the visual design using our design systems toolkit and created documentation to pass off to engineers.
In the following sprint, engineers implemented those designs.
Every 2 months, we had user research to see if we were on the right track.
