Boden Checkout

Redesigning Boden’s checkout flow in line with a company wide systems re-platforming project

Overview

The Challenge

The Boden checkout journey presented users with multiple points of friction, overwhelming unnecessary content, and outdated features that cause high abandon rates and contacts to customer service.

The Goal

Streamline the checkout flow from bag through to order confirmation, creating an intuitive and frictionless journey for users and increase conversion.

Implement industry standard changes that will support future development plans.

Role: Lead UX Designer - UX Design, Research, UI Design, & Testing

Deliverables: User flows, Wireframes, Prototypes, Research and Testing reports

Site Analysis

In order to gain a thorough understanding of the existing checkout product, I undertook a live site analysis of the checkout journey on both mobile and desktop platforms for the Boden UK and Boden USA markets.

Through this process I identified a number of ‘quick win’ small changes our development team would be able to make to improve the existing experience, as well as understand the fundamental challenges needing to be addressed in the redesign.

Competitor Analysis

With the key challenges identified I felt it was important to undertake competitor analysis that could give an indication of;

current industry standards in bag and checkout design

online shopping customers expectations of a checkout experience

These competitor insights provided the standard we could work towards with the checkout redesign, and were a useful reference point when justifying design decisions to product and development teams further down the line.

User Flows

Using the previously completed analyses, I began to map out the various user flows that could be taken in the customer checkout journey. These user flows mapped out the stages of the checkout experience, and what features would be required at each step.

Once the core flow was established, various edge cases were mapped out in order to consider variations in user journeys including;

  • Guest checkout

  • Logged in checkout with saved details

  • Logged in checkout without saved details

  • Express payment checkouts

  • Shipping vs Click & Collect

  • Boden staff accounts

These user flows were taken into initial workshops with UX, Product Management, and Development to discuss initial project prioritisation and validate the technical viability of suggested design decisions. Iterations were made on the user flows where needed before moving in the design stage.

Wireframes

With the user flows and features mapped out and signed off on with product management and development teams, I moved into designing initial wireframes for the Bag, ‘Mini Bag’, and Checkout flow.

Starting with low-fi wireframes before moving into higher fidelity designs, I had regular check ins with the broader project team to ensure business expectations, user needs, and technical viability were all being balanced throughout the process.

Throughout this stage care was taken to ensure all edge cases and error states were considered and mapped into designs.

UI Design

Working closely with the team’s UI Designer, I implemented the Boden design guidelines into high-fidelity wireframes for presentation to the wider project team. During this stage we collaborated on interaction design elements including quantity selectors, loading states, and error states.

Usability Testing

Before fully handing over designs to development it was important to validate our design decisions with customers, to ensure we were meeting user needs and expectations.

Prototypes were developed with Axure of the ‘Mini Bag’ and Bag, and the Checkout flow in order to conduct usability testing through remote user interviews.

The user testing feedback gave us great results;

  • Overall average ease of use 6.75 / 7 

  • Overall confidence in checkout design 7 / 7

  • Positive response by users to the checkout designs with no major usability issues uncovered

  • Small design changes suggested to clear some points of hesitation indicated by testers for MVP checkout release

“Everything worked well... All efficient and nothing confusing. I never got frustrated.  It was as streamlined as can be."

With small adjustments made based on user feedback, we were able to deploy designs to developers, maintaining a close working relationship and open dialogue with the team throughout the development process to address any development queries and perform UAT.

Next steps…

Towards the end of 2022 the business decision was made to move away from the planned re-platforming to Microsoft D365, and to pivot focus towards moving to an integrated Shopify based platform. The planning and initial designs stages have been taking place throughout 2023.

Although the designs from the D365 platform were ultimately put to one side, we were able to reference the design decisions made for this project in adapting the Shopify checkout experience for Boden. This work is ongoing into 2024.