Amazon’s Luxury Beauty
I led the user experience and visual design of the Amazon Coupons experience, which included the Home page, Category and Landing pages, as well as a host of widgets and components. The goals of this project was to introduce personalization into the coupon experience, spur adoption of targeted coupon campaigns, make it easier for users to find specific brands, and refresh the overall customer aesthetic. Based on how coupons generated profits, even a small change could provide a dramatic improvements to revenue.
Discovery
The previous Coupon experience had several areas that needed to address, such as a confusing browsing and clipping experience, as well as an inability to easily surface vendor branding and personalization. To address this, I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the experience and created a set of requirements, and outlined coupon use cases. The scope of this project was extremely large, as the team needed to address a single coupon being applied to a single item, as well as more complex use cases where a single coupon needed to apply to multiple products and Amazon programs, including Prime Pantry, Subscribe & Save, and Amazon Fresh.
After the requirements and use cases were validated, I worked with our team to define the success metrics for the new experience, which included:
Increase the number of new coupon users
Increase in the number of new coupons clipped
Improve number of coupons clipped per-customer
Increase in purchases from a coupon
Once success metrics were defined, I documented the coupons categorization and outlined a flow chart to communicate how users would consume the coupons experience.
Design – Framework & Wireframes
Once I was able to gain a consensus on the requirements and flow, I began creating the generic framework through low-fidelity wireframes to help the team understand how the user would access and consume the experience. At each stage I validated decisions with both internal and external users using short guerrilla usability studies.
Design – Aesthetics
From our short guerrilla studies and wireframes, I created high-fidelity designs of the core Coupons experience, including the Coupons home page, Category page, and Landing page. In addition to those primary pages, the project touch high-traffic product detail pages and checkout, as well as other programs including Subscribe & Save, Amazon Prime, Baby Registry, Beauty, Amazon Fresh, and Prime Pantry. It was important I coordinate and negotiate with other programs and stakeholders to ensure our experience meet their requirements and could be implemented as part of their roadmap.
These designs were created using Photoshop and Illustrator and then modified in Axure to create prototypes for interactions and animations.
Validate – Selector Usability Study
To validate this experience, I facilitated 2 usability studies of 10 participants each. All participants were existing Amazon coupon customers that they had used a coupon in the last 30 days. I worked with our research group to create a recruiting model, screener survey, and usability study kit that included the goals of the study, task list, research questions, and user paths.
For each session I observed customers completing a set of tasks using the current experience and gathered feedback. We then introduced our new coupon experience and asked participants to complete the same tasks and gathered feedback. After they completed the tasks, we interviewed each participant and had them complete a survey to gather quantitative data.
From our usability studies we found a dramatic increase in user engagement and satisfaction.
Deliver – Style Guides, Redlines, & Guidance
With the usability study complete, I began the process of preparing the experience for delivery to our development team. Several different types of deliverables were required to ensure the vision was implemented properly. As our development team was closely involved during our research, design, and validation stages that had a basic understanding of the experience, which lessened the need for extensive documentation.
I developed a style guide to give details and guidance around the framework, layout, and components. I then created a set of redlines for each component to give more in-depth guidance and worked with the Human Interface Guidelines team to get new components and patterns introduced to the global design group. Once these were prepared, I presented the artifacts to the development team and was on-hand for the development to ensure they had a resource available.
