Ecommerce cart management

Overview

The purchasing process for customers in the public safety sector often requires multiple levels of approvals prior to the actual purchase. Buyers need to prepare multiple orders, save them for a period of time while they are routed for approval, modify as needed, and ultimately purchase at the end of the month.

Problem statement

Customers need to save and manage multiple carts over several sessions and routes for approval.

Users & audience

Communications/Radio system manager - Radio communications/technician - Procurement manager/agent

My roles & responsibilities

UX, wireframes, prototype

Scope & constraints

Flagship project for a new design led process. Many stakeholders. Off-site development. Unclear requirements, tech/dev restraints.

Process

Our cart platform did not inherently have the ability to save carts (a backlog item) and we needed to design the user flows, scenarios and the user interface. A matrix of relationships among users to accounts to contracts to carts added to the complexity and need for clear direction.

First, the primary need is to save the entire cart. A majority of the scenarios we designed pertained to the relationship between an Active Cart and a Saved Cart or the managing application itself.

I delivered an interactive, object-based concept that allowed users to move items and between carts as well as assign carts to accounts/contract relationships. We, a collaboration between dev and design, opted to remove, or not enable, the transferring of items between carts.

After initial reviews and tests, we discovered a big concern with a user's ability to identify their active cart, or the cart that is currently associated with the Shopping Cart page. Users would start a new session and begin adding items to cart - 10, 15, sometimes 2 or 3 dozen items only to find that they had added items to the wrong cart. By using the cart icon and an informational call out, we removed this confusion.

Given the application will be new, I proposed a dismissible welcome tour-like experience the first time the application is opened. We tested and felt confident about the object affordances and a user’s ability to learn the application without the tour.

Outcomes & lessons learned

Ultimately, this design proved too forward thinking for what developers were willing to complete. In tandem, I had a junior designer create a more simplified version that satisfied requirements and a quicker build - we double delivered.