Problem
The Purchase Process was originally designed to be linear, which forced the user to go through the steps in chronological order. The linear design addressed the challenge of interdependencies between steps, but did not allow users the freedom to jump to different steps. The design lacks clarity and flexibility.

Project Goals
Customer: Increase confidence and clarity, while decreasing completion time.
Business: Design a flexible, repurposable system that creates a streamlined experience and builds long-term efficiencies for our teams.

Non-Goals
A system that creates more confusion than it resolves, either because it is overly complicated or oversimplified.
A short-sighted series of patches that only gets us through the next few quarters.

The project required a significant amount of time in the Discovery phase. There are several complexities around each step and how they are dependent on other steps.

Stakeholder Interviews
My team and I started with a weeklong series of stakeholder interviews. We interviewed our project stakeholders, leadership teams and our customer service agents who directly handle user questions and problems.

Competitive Analysis
Between stakeholder interviews, we completed a competitive analysis and came together to share findings. We found UX patterns that sparked inspiration for our project.

Step Dependencies
Once we had a clear understanding of each step and its dependencies, we outlined them in a chart. This would be key to discovering our solution.

User Stages
I thought about the different user stages we needed to design for. This included the whole user journey, what the steps looked like, and what the key messaging needed to be.

The Discover phase was dense but critical; it provided clarity and information that needed organization. We organized this information in a presentation.

Define the Problem, Articulate Our Approach
Because this project had a lot of unique moving parts, it was important we gathered our stakeholders and filled them in our process, findings and plans. 

User Testing
We tested two early ideas with users with the goal of gathering interpretations of the design intent and learning about user preference.

VIEW CONCEPT TESTING PROTOTYPE  →

Improve and Retest
When we heard more than two users say the same thing, we quickly improved the prototype and retested with new users. This allowed us to rapidly gain insights and test improvements. We used research and our best judgment to get closer and closer to the right solution.

We are currently in the Deliver phase – we're getting ready to hand off our design and gain stakeholder approval. Our designs are delivered in clear flows and a working prototype.