lowe’s list redesign

 
 
 

OVERVIEW

Lowe’s DIY and Pro customers don’t have the tools they need to easily create, manage and add items to their lists in the Lowe’s mobile app.

Lists are a powerful e-commerce tool that allow customers to quickly save items they may want to purchase in the future, and create/share personalized purchase lists. Successful implementations of lists have proven to help reduce cart abandonment rate and increase conversion, increase visitors/brand loyalty through list sharing and allow the business to better understand what items customers want. 

With upcoming Pro, Store Map and other integration plans with lists, it was critical to redesign and provide a reliable base experience to build on top of.

ROLE & DETAILS

Lead Product Designer

User research, competitive analysis, iterative wireframing, simulations, user testing, high-fi designs and documentation, visual QA with dev and business partners. I also designed all of the empty-state illustrations.

Team

2 Product Managers, 1 Business Analyst, 1 Product Designer, 1 Sr. Content Strategist, 17 Software Developers (iOS/Android)

Deliverables

iOS light and dark mode: phone, tablet portrait, and tablet landscape. Android light mode: phone, tablet portrait, and tablet landscape

Timeline

August 2021 - December 2021

 
 
 
 

CHALLENGE

How might we design a native experience that gives both DIY and Pro customers the ability to create, manage and share their lists, while future-proofing it so that it can be integrated with store maps, allowing customers to easily route their items while in a Lowe’s retail store?

The current experience presents many problems and challenges for our users; the main one being that it’s not a super helpful or useful feature. Customers can save an item from the product description page (PDP) to their “Quicklist,” which acts as their default list. Although our users are able to create additional lists, the functionality is lacking, especially when compared to other e-commerce apps on the market. Users are only able to save items to the lists they create by “transferring” the items from their Quicklist, which is inefficient and clunky. Additionally, there is an apparent problem with hierarchy. The experience doesn’t show much information on the items customers add to their lists (the basic one being price), and users aren’t able to easily add or remove multiple items. Given that Quicklist is a main feature of the Lowe’s app, the fact that only 30% of the yearly 31.5 million mobile app users utilize it shows that the experience isn’t proving worthy to our customers. Additionally, we needed to be able to design an experience that could be easily updated to account for new experiences (e.g. store maps).

 
 
 

CURRENT EXPERIENCE

 

Quicklist landing screen. User is able to view the items they’ve saved as well as add free form text.

My Lists landing screen. User is able to view their lists they’ve created.

User is able to transfer or “assign” saved items to other lists, add to cart, and remove by swiping on individual items.

User can assign the saved item from their Quicklist to other lists they’ve created,

Example of items in a list the user has created.

 
 

From app store customer reviews, these were the key overarching customer pain points:

  • Can't easily add items to a project list

  • App/web quick lists don't sync

  • Can't easily remove items

  • Can't add list items to cart

  • Can't share lists

 

“What’s the point of having the ability to create a list if I’m not able to easily add products to them?”

PROCESS

Working closely with Product and Engineering partners, I needed to understand how our users currently use Quicklist. Turns out…they’re not really using it! Gathering data and feedback from the App Store, Medallia, Adobe Analytics and Usertesting.com, the majority of users expressed issues with not being able to easily add products to a list they created themselves. In fact, most didn’t even know “My Lists” existed; they would only save items to their Quicklist because it was the simplest thing to do. Knowing this, I strategized with our business/dev partners on whether or not it made sense to deprecate Quicklist. After all, if we wanted to give the power to the customers, shouldn’t we be allowing them to save items to the lists they create themselves? I also had to ensure that I was designing an experience that was dynamic enough for future integrations while in-store.

  • User research. Understand how our users utilize Quicklist.

  • User test additional people to get immediate feedback on the current experience, in real time.

  • Competitive analysis. What are other apps doing? What are they not doing? How can we cater our lists to our unique users?

  • Sketch-boarding and low-fidelity, iterative wireframing. How might this experience look without any constraints or limitations? What is necessary for day 1, MVP, and what is the acceptance criteria?

  • User testing with high-fidelity designs

  • High fidelity designs and documentation for a day 1, MVP experience.

 
 

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

I explored what other e-commerce apps were doing with lists, which included Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and other one-offs like Publix and Sephora. How were these apps catering to their unique user base? What made utilizing lists within an app better than, say, utilizing the Notes app on an iPhone, or Google Keep on an Android? What were they doing differently, or not so differently?

My findings:

  • Most apps utilize lists in a very similar way by allowing customers to save a product from the PDP to their “Saved” items.

  • Most apps allow users to create their own lists to categorize their products.

  • Most apps have a clear hierarchy that allows users to see the price of an item and add that item to their cart

  • Most apps allow users to perform “mass actions” on the products in their list for ease/efficiency

 
 

WIREFRAMES

When designing for each screen, I made multiple wireframes for feedback and discussion sessions with my Product partners and internal UX team.

Most of these wireframes showcase the various actions the user can make throughout their journey. I wanted to make sure I was understanding the requirements and AC’s while also working through all potential scenarios/actions. A lot of these wires display a “North Star” approach, where I included what the experience could be for our customers, as well as how we could drill it down to give customers the basic functions they needed. The wires at the end are more high-fidelity thanks to our Backyard Design System, making it extremely easy to insert components and make iterative wireframing quicker.

 
 
 

HIGH-FIDELITY WIREFRAME EXPLORATION

 

List landing screen. Explored a floating action button and full-width, as well as the actions the user could take

A different approach to the layout for each list

 
 
 

Exploration for mass-selecting products

Exploration of capabilities/actions at the top for when a user needs to have additional functions.

 
 

USER TESTING

Testing the experience with various users was crucial to understanding if this experience made sense, as well as if users thought the experience would be useful to them. 6 unmoderated usability tests were conducted via usertesting.com, with 23 tasks and 4 post-test questions.

 
 

Approach:

Explore participants' reactions to creating a new list and adding items to an existing list within Lowe's mobile app to ensure visual design, product content and interactions are clear.

Explored the following areas during the Create a new list flow:

  • Interpretations of the heart icon

  • Ease of navigating to My Lists

  • Collect contextual feedback on the frequency of use and purpose of the following fields when creating a new list:

    • Project or Location

    • Description

Explored the following scenarios during the Add to an existing list flow:

  • Collected expectations on thumbnails within the lists' cards

  • How to rename a list

  • Collected feedback on options available within the overflow ("...") menu

  • How to reorder lists

  • Deleting items from a list

  • Adding items to cart from a list

 
 

Key Findings:

All participants were successfully able to add a product to a new and existing list within the app, with little-to-no hesitation. Average time-on-task for these activities was less than a minute for successful completion.

  • All participants liked the thumbnails and the quantity of items within the list on the individual list cards. 4/6 participants expected the see the item they last added to the list to be shown on the far left.

  • All participants immediately went to the kabob menu in order to rename the list. The process of renaming met expectations.

  • All participants were able to successfully add selected items to their cart via the checkboxes.

  • All participants considered the ability to add an entire list to cart as highly valuable.

  • 4/6 participants expected the items that were added to the cart to be removed from their list. Furthermore, these participants knew that if they wanted to reorder or re-add the item(s) to their list, they would be able to find the item as a past-purchase within their Account.

 
 

RESULTS & NEXT STEPS

Based on the user feedback from user testing and current MVP requirements, I continued iterating on the actions throughout the user flows to make it more seamless for our users. I continue to show my work to my internal UX team as well as work closely with development to ensure scalability and that we’re accounting for all use cases. This is an ongoing project slated to launch at the end of December 2021. Future iterations will include integrating functionality for users to route their items while in-store using the Store Maps feature.

Future functionality to keep in mind: sorting and filtering lists/items within a list, allowing the user to order their lists the way they want, and searching/adding an item to a list from the My Lists screen (a major feature I’m pushing for!).

Click the image to the right to be taken to the working prototype for the most updated experience.