Store Reserve Bag
Customers value reserving items online to try in store, but the existing Store Reserve experience is inefficient if customers want to reserve more than one item. By reconfiguring the flow around a "Reserve Bag," customers save time by reserving items all at once.
My Role
Design lead
I collaborated with Product, Program, UX Writing, and UX Research to streamline the Store Reserve flow for customers reserving multiple items. I led the design effort from early concepts through dev-ready UI, gathered feedback in peer workshops, and created prototypes for usability testing (about a three month effort altogether). This project was paused prior to development to accommodate higher priority work.
Known opportunities
Existing experience
Store Reserve launched in 2016 as a way for customers to pick out what they want online, reserve them, and then try it on in store without the pressure to buy or interact with a salesperson. Store Reserve had two parts:
1. Reserve items through the mobile app
The existing experience was inefficient for both customers and employees because the customer could only reserve one item at a time, and in turn, employees fulfilling an order had to piece together which items a customer was coming in to try. Customers were also taken out of the context of browsing each time they were asked to confirm and review their reservation for an item.
2. Come into the store to try them on
When all items in a customer’s reservation have been collected, they receive a notification that their reservation is ready to try. When the customer is near the store, an employee will gets notified that the customer is on their way and puts the items in a dressing room in the Order Pickup area so the customer can just walk right in.
competing priorities
Where should it live?
It was clear early on that to support reserving multiple items at once, the customer would first need to collect the items they wanted to reserve all in one place. The questions was, where should that place be? Of all the areas in the Nordstrom App, it made the most sense for the IA to surface bulk reservations in the shopping bag because it follows customers' mental model for collecting items and then taking an action on them all at once. After exploring many iterations, the winning design meant repurposing the "Saved For Later" tab and moving items saved for later below items in the shopping bag.
new concept
Educating customers
The biggest challenge on this project was figuring out how to tell customers where the Reserve Bag lives and that action is required to complete the reservation. A reservation is inherently a tentative concept and we were concerned customers could tap “Add to Reserve Bag” and consider the task complete. I worked closely with my UX Writer to make sure we were setting the right expectation.
Because this was a new concept, I decided to show a confirmation modal the first few times customers add an item to their Reserve Bag. Once they learn where to go, we could take a more minimal approach. I made the modal just big enough to show the necessary information so we could keep them in the context of the product page. By pinning it to the bottom of the screen, as opposed to centering it, there’s a stronger connection between the confirmation and where to go to finish the task.
Iterations of the “Add to Reserve Bag” confirmation message.
My early iterations included a button to dismiss the notification and a button to move forward with completing the reservation. After numerous peer workshops, I realized these buttons added a lot of visual noise that distracted from the key message. The buttons were also redundant with actions that already appeared in the screen. I got rid of the buttons and was left with a much simpler design.
USABILITY
Iterative prototype testing
I created three prototypes with Proto.io for usability testing. In partnership with a UX Researcher, we decided to do a remote unmoderated study with UserTesting because the test was fairly short and the research question fairly defined: “Do customers know where to find their Reserve Bag?”
Three rounds of research later, we identified an approach that validated customers understood three main criteria:
How to add to reserve bag
The fact that they needed to take action to complete the reservation
How to complete the reservation
on hold
Plan for future testing
As of February 2019, this project was put on hold due to a shift in priorities. However, the plan would be to A/B test this design against the existing “one by one” design. Possible success metrics include the number of reservations, the number of items per reservation, and the customer satisfaction score for checkout since there will be an impact to the Save For Later experience.