Amazon’s Subscribe & Save
I led the program redesign of the Amazon Subscribe & Save Experience that let customers to set up a recurring monthly delivery for select items on Amazon.com. This redesign included all Subscribe & Save messaging and experiences across Amazon.com, including the Program Overview page, Manage Your Delivery page, Subscription pages, Landing pages, Navigation, Landing pages, Category pages, and Checkout, as well as more than 2 dozen widgets and other components.
The overall goal was to make the experience easier to use and more cohesive, enhance the program branding, make the program discount messaging more transparent, clarify delivery schedules, and create parity across all form factors.
Discovery
This was an incredibly large and complex problem to solve. When I came onboard, the experience was fractured and inconsistent with multiple, conflicting patterns for the same interactions, and the visual design was erratic.
I started by conducting a heuristic evaluation of the entire experience. During my evaluation, I interviewed several internal stakeholders within Amazon, more than 20 current Subscribe & Save customers, and several users who expressed interesting in monthly or recurring deliveries but were not part of the program. From these activities I developed several hypotheses to make the program messaging and experience easier to understand, and created user flows to convey how users expected to navigate the experience.
Armed with this information, I gathered generic demographic information and reviewed analytical data on how users interacted with the program, to refine and formalize the project requirements. I also defined the success, which included:
Increase the number of new customers
Reduce the contacts to customer service
87%
increase in new customers
Extend the
number of new subscriptions
43%
Decrease in customer contacts
Increase the
number of monthly deliveries
Design – Framework & Wireframes
Once I understood the requirements and goals, I created sketches to convey the user experience and help align my stakeholders. From those sketches, I created a set of wireframes and defined the primary pages of the Subscribe & Save experience to identify reusable components and help focus my limited resources. During this process, I continually held small guerrilla usability tests to validate ideas and functionality.
While our initial goal was to have feature parity with our desktop experience, usability testing was showing that users wanted a unique mobile-centric experience that still allowed access to advanced functionality. I focused on giving users a glanceable view of items coming in their monthly delivery and the ability to quickly move items in and out of their monthly delivery.
Design – Aesthetics
I created high-fidelity designs of the core pages, as well as high-traffic product detail pages and checkout. These designs were created using Photoshop and Illustrator and then defined in Axure to create prototypes to introduce and test interactions and animations.
During explorations, I was asked to consider how the experience could be expanded to provide a single experience to house deliveries from Subscribe & Save, Amazon Fresh, and Amazon Prime Pantry. I created several high-fidelity designs and a prototype for testing. Despite positive feedback, we elected to push that project to a future deliverable to maintain an strong MVE and smaller scope.
Validate – Usability Study
To validate our experience I facilitated a usability studies of 12 participants who were all existing Amazon Subscribe & Save customers. 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, and research questions.
For each session I watched customers complete a set of tasks using the current experience and gathered their feedback. We then introduced our new experience and asked them to complete the same set of tasks and gathered feedback. After they completed the tasks, we interviewed each participant and had them complete a survey to gather quantitative data.
While we surfaced several issues we had not anticipated, participants agreed that the new experience was easier to use and understand.
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 types of deliverables were required to ensure our vision was implemented properly. As our development team was closely involved during our research, design, and validation stages this provided a basic understanding of the experience, which lessened the need for extensive documentation.
I created a style guide to give details, created a set of redlines, and presented new patterns to the Human Interface Guidelines team and the Amazon User Interface team to get new components, patterns, and designs distributed to the global design group.
Post-Launch
Despite the size this project, after we launched our analytic data showed that we successfully achieved our goals. We saw a dramatic increase in new customers, new subscriptions, and a huge decrease in customer support contacts for the Subscribe & Save program.
57%
Increase in new subscriptions
