Amazon: Instant Pickup
My Role: UX, Visual Design, Research
I designed a brand new service for Amazon—Instant Pickup—and added improvements after launch by usability testing customers, analyzing metrics, and mapping customer journeys.
Instant Pickup is the fastest speed Amazon offers. Customers can browse and order items from the Instant Pickup section of the Amazon app, then pick up their order 2 minutes later from a locker.
See below for how I designed this new service, then added improvements to increase the purchase rate by 31% after launch.
Storyboard
Screen flow
Challenge: Customers need to be able to add Instant Pickup items to their order, while still seeing the status of their current order, at all times.
Solution: A split screen layout. Their current order status lives on the top-half of the page, while the bottom shows Instant Pickup items they can add on. If customers interact with Instant Pickup, it expands to take up most of the screen, collapsing their current order to a small status bar at the top.
Usability testing
I put together a mobile Flinto prototype and tested it out with real customers at our closest store location.
Findings:
Users prefer to browse items by category instead of in large assorted grids.
Users did not understand these items were available “instantly”. They assumed they would come back to pick them up in a few days.
Changes:
Implement horizontally scrolling categories
Update wording to specify “Pick up in 2 minutes”
Launch
Click the below image to see the final design, or watch the above video which includes animated transitions.
Post-launch research
After Instant Pickup launched, I ran usability tests and gathered feedback from customers and store associates. Based on my data, I compiled several customer journey maps with input from stakeholders to understand the journey our customers go through when they use Instant Pickup--what are their moments of delight, and where are their pain points? This helped us prioritize which enhancements to do next.
Customer journey map of a first-time user
Post-launch design update
Research showed that our primary issue was still comprehension--some customers assumed that these Instant Pickup items would be ready in days instead of minutes.
I brainstorming with design, development, and product management to come up with dozens of ideas to fix this problem. We narrowed down our ideas and decided to validate through rapid user testing.
Rapid prototyping & testing
I quickly prototyped our best ideas in Flinto and flew down to one of our pickup locations in order to user test with real customers.
The first day, we discovered that none of our ideas increased comprehension. Making wording and layout changes on the fly, I ended up testing a dozen prototypes with 52 participants over the span of 3 days. By the end of the third day, we had our winning solution.
Winning solution
The problem was that the users' eyes would go straight to the massive spinner telling them their wait time, and would not look away to read the Instant Pickup widget title. Unless customers read the widget title, they would not realize the items were available instantly.
The following changes successfully fixed this problem:
Dramatically condensed the size of the pickup wait timer to a small bar at the top of the page
Introduced a green banner that covered up the wait timer for the first 4 seconds
These changes ensured that customers read the title and understood the items were available for Instant Pickup instead of standard two-day pickup.
Enhancement launched
Metrics showed that this enhancement increased the purchase rate by 31% in the first two weeks after launch!
(View "Winning prototype" video above to see the final design with animated transitions.)
