Schedule a Card
Challenge / Problem
Background
Lovepop is a very seasonal business with the majority of the card sales occurring either around Valentines day, but even more so around Christmas. One of the most popular features of Lovepop is their Personalize and Send feature, which has the customer enter a message that is then handwritten into the card and sent directly to the recipient. This requires a bit of time during the fulfillment process which could cause a build up of cards to be fulfilled, meaning some of them could miss arriving in time for Christmas.
Problem and Previous Solutions
Having your card (especially one you may have paid over $20 for) not arrive on time is a terrible user experience and can greatly affect that customers willingness to purchase cards in the future. To help combat the issue, Lovepop aggressively marketed last chance dates based on USPS send times, cutting off “arrives by Christmas” 3-4 days before the 25th. This did lead to a small reduction in late cards, but lead to another issue of a large build up of orders that needed to be fulfilled on the 21st which required extra workers to be staffed to get through the backlog and still ended up with cards missing the delivery date, even when placed before the cutoff date.
New Problem to Solve
How can we alleviate the shipping burden from clustered Holiday card purchases while maintaining or increasing customer card purchase volume.
Now there’s quite a lot there to unpack, so I broke down this initiative into my design process to ensure we were both building the right thing, and building it right.
I’m a big fan of the double diamond design process and typically use a modified version in my design process, with a few extra resources sprinkled in based on the project.
Process
Modified British Design Council’s Double Diamond
Now that double diamond might be a lot to take in (I’m a big fan of data visualization but even this attempt requires a bit of a voice over). That being said, this process can also be broken up into a few linear steps, detailed below, which I applied to this project.
Research
Rip the Brief
In order to ensure we are building the right thing, we have to start with prodding questions into the design brief or problem statement, that statement was
How can we alleviate the shipping burden from clustered Holiday card purchases while maintaining or increasing customer card purchase volume.
Okay, let’s dig into this a bit. A sample of some of the questions I asked to further clarify the problem were:
Why is it clustered around Holidays?
How would alleviating this business burden help the customer?
What, if any, technical limitations do we have with the way we fulfill card orders?
Is Christmas the only holiday where this is a problem?
How many cards are delivered late?
What’s the impact on the customers repeat rate when a card is delivered late?
How much of a guarantee on arrival date can we accurately give?
Cluster Topics
In order to help identify the methods of research needed, I began to cluster these questions into topics. Some of the topics that arose were
Internal / Fulfillment questions
Understanding user purchasing patterns and motivations
Uncovering friction in the current personalize and send experience
Understanding customer expectations and feelings (both with the card sending experience as well as when delivery dates are missed)
Primary and Secondary Research
I used a combination of Primary (user focus groups, user interviews, internal interviews) as well as Secondary (seasonal e-commerce trends, USPS shipping estimates, internal purchasing trend data) research in order to help answer these questions.
Synthesis
With a whole lot of raw data and some very interesting conversations, both internal and external, it was time to organize these findings into insights, themes, opportunity areas, and finally HMWs with the goal of converging back to a refined problem statement and design brief ready for ideation.
Insights
Through my conversations, some of the more interesting insights that stood out were:
Customer / External
Customers not only considered holidays as important dates to buy cards for, but also life milestones, like birthdays, anniversaries, and even funerals 😬
This is something we would have perhaps overlooked when considering a solution considering our main focus was alleviating a burden of fixed date holidays and not the variability of one’s birthday or anniversary.
People felt rushed with the sending cutoff dates and sometimes made mistakes on the note text which they wished they had time to go back and edit
This was also a crucial insight as any solution should consider a waiting period before fulfillment if possible
Customers had anxiety about delivery dates and wanted to know when the card would be delivered (in case it got there early, or if it was going to be late) so they could tell the recipient
Clearly communicating delivery windows, and having comms for both successful deliver and missed delivery date would be important to keep in mind when building a solution
Customers had a perceived expectation that Lovepop would remember that they sent a birthday card or Holiday card and remind them the next year
This was interesting as it was assumed we would automatically do this, but we did not have that functionality
Customers expressed difficulty in coming up with what to write in a card and usually looked for inspiration before completing their purchase. Some even got stuck at this point and forgot to finish their purchase.
This identified a previously unknown friction point in the Personalize and Send experience and something we could look to also potentially address in our solution
Customers who purchased cards close to the cutoff wanted to take advantage our our personalize and send feature but could not future date the delivery, so ended up just buying the card and sending themselves or waiting until closer to the date
We saw customers basically ask directly for a scheduled send service which is something we could try to quickly validate
Internal
Our 3PL (3rd Party Logistics provider) can only support up to 90 days of pre-dated USPS package labels, although any that were mailed direct to recipients (stamps, not package labels) do not have an expiry
This was important to know as it would be a limitation in how far in advance we could support cards being sent to purchases, though the majority of these cards are sent directly to the recipient which only requires stamps
USPS delivery dates are most accurate within a 3 day window
This helps us set realistic expectations on delivery dates
Themes
These insights, coupled with additional data and the problem statement lead to the following themes:
Scheduled Send: Ability to schedule for future delivery
Send Days: Holidays + Life Events
Set Expectations: Delivery Windows
Reduce Creative Block: Help customers come up with what to write
Opportunity Areas
From our research a scheduled send service would fill a need for both our 3PL logistics jam as well as our customers desire to delay a direct send of a card (for more than just the holidays). This was a gap in our current functionality that would provide both a user and business benefits. After reviewing the research and the themes, I received stakeholder buy in to continue with the design and development of a scheduled send service.
HMWs (How Might We’s)
Now came a crucial point in the process, we were converging on a solution, finding the right thing to build, but now we needed to ensure we would be setup to build it right. This led to a collaborative session with Product and Engineering to come up with HMWs (How might we’s). Our team came up with the following HMWs to solve for during the ideation and design phase:
HMW show customers what types of events they can schedule for?
HMW ensure we cover all the holidays and life events that matter to customers?
HMW encourage repeat behavior through a great experience?
HMW remove the friction and anxiety of not knowing what to write?
HMW communicate delivery windows and set expectations?
HMW handle payment? At purchase, or at send?
HMW respond if the card misses it’s date?
Ideation
One of the first things I looked to do during ideation was to attempt to gain some validation in tandem with designing out the service. Working with the team, we were able to create a small test with the existing personalize and send flow, adding a check box for “deliver by a specific date” with date picker that would pop up.
Each of these orders had to be manually fulfilled from the office and then dropped in the mail 3 days before the requested date, but it proved we were onto the right solution as it had a high engagement rate and follow up surveys to customers that used the feature were all positive (with a few suggesting additional features that we added to our ideation sessions)
Story Boards / Wireframes
With some validation in our back pocket, some customer suggested features and our own ideas, we started to draft out potential features and I began to story board out some wireframes of the experience
From our research we knew we wanted to incorporate a few key features in the designs:
Support Holidays with fixed dates (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc), life events with variable dates (Birthday’s, Anniversaries), and specific dates that would allow for customers to choose a day not covered by the previous two categories.
Allow for the occasion to be remembered and remind the customer the following year
Clearly communicate the delivery window and set expectations on how accurate that estimate is
Offer creative prompts to help with crafting messages
Design
User Flows
After reviewing the wireframes, I put together user flows to build the story behind the screens.
Design / Prototype / Test
With these user flows, I then built them into a clickable prototype in order to test with customers. Some of the insight found through iterative testing:
“Whenever” didn’t resonate with customers, they were confused on how to skip the scheduling step if it didn’t apply to them and recommended saying ASAP as an option instead of “whenever”
Customers assumed the holidays would always be in upcoming order
Customers liked seeing the date for Holidays, especially for ones that changed year to year like memorial day or thanksgiving
Customers wanted delivery ranges explicitly called out when they picked a date
Customers wondered if they could add relationship to get more specific text prompt recommendations (mentioned this is how they shop for cards at stores, “birthday for him”, “mom’s anniversary”)
High Fidelity Designs
After incorporating the feedback, the focus was on high fidelity designs and this is where I pushed to include moments of delight in the experience.
Time for a quick aside! One of my favorite tools I use in my design process is something I discovered quite a while ago called the UX Checklist. It’s a comprehensive overview of everything design should consider when taking an idea from concept to completion. Shameless plug for all designers to incorporate it into their strategy. You can find it here: https://uxchecklist.github.io/
Some of the polish included illustrations for the different holidays in unique mono-color palettes as well as Personalization when a customer added the recipients name, for example, after picking a birthday card, the as soon as you wrote that it’s for Jonathan, it was referenced as Jonathan’s Birthday Card throughout the rest of the flow. I also made sure to include micro-copy to help set expectations on options customers would select or to give extra context when needed.
Considered / Deferred
During the course of refining the design, heading towards annotations and handoff, we had to make a few decisions around scope reduction in order to meet our timelines. This is why it is so important to have engineering and product involved throughout the design process so that everyone on the team is in lock step and expectations are shared. A few of the features that we pushed to future milestones included:
Additional life events (graduation, wedding, funeral)
Option to have “Don’t Open Until” hand written on envelopes
Edit ability after order placed (this was a fast follow but required additional engineering time to build a queueing service before sending to the 3PL)
Annotations and Handoff
Once the designs were reviewed, tested, and finalized, it was time to hand off to the development team. I added all of the screens to Zeplin (a collaboration and inspection tool we used) with annotations on requirements, behaviors, as well as the user flow chart and an interactive Invision prototype to demonstrate expected functionality. I like to be as thorough as possible in my annotations, especially calling out reusable components from our design system. Even the best annotated designs shouldn’t be the be all end all as I continued to work with the engineers on any questions or tweaks needed to be made to balance the design goals with any technical constraints that may come up.
UX Review
Another process I put in place was a UX review on staging before releasing the product. I find this extremely valuable to do a final check and make sure there is product and design sign off before shipping out our solution. In this case we had a few minor issues, but I’m glad we caught them before they went live!
Measurement
As design, it’s important to monitor and measure the impact of the solutions created and ensure that we have built the right thing, and built it right. This project was no exception and we measured the following impact:
# of orders that included a scheduled card
Ended up being 9% of all orders post release!
# of cards delivered on time in December
We saw a large reduction in late deliveries
# of cards fulfilled November to December
We saw a reduction in the amount of cards we needed to fulfill leading up to the cutoff date, with an increased volume of cards purchased spread across prior months
AOV of orders
We also saw an increase in AOV (average order value) when a scheduled card was part of the order
Continuing The User Journey
I’m a big fan of the Hook Model, pioneered by Nir Eyal (highly recommend Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products if you haven’t read it). The Hook model is centralized around four main actions, a trigger, an action, a variable reward, and investment.
The Scheduled Send service presented a great opportunity to invest in this model and we added email communication to customers when their cards arrived on their requested day with calls to action to schedule their next card delivery as well as our reminder emails. We were also able to collect substantial amounts of data around relationships and occasions from our customers that we were able to leverage for more engaging recommendations and timely emails.
We’re Never Done
The scheduled card service was a success for both our customers and our business but there’s always room for improvement so I added a CSAT survey to the end of the flow to ask users how their experience was using the scheduled card service and what could be improved. I think also challenging ourselves to continually learn and improve not only helps our business grow, but ourselves as professionals as well.
