@CHEWY
Arrives by date
Fixing a core customer issue by operating at depth
Chewy’s Autoship product is highly successful, however core usabilities issues create a high rate of churn and customer contacts. Previous to this project, the program centered around a nebulous “next fulfillment date” vs giving customer more clarity on when their order would actually arrive.
“Next order date” means nothing to customers, resulting in the unexpected
The problem
Transition the service to be “arrives by” date focused
The project
Manage Autoship as it existed before for the ABD project. The top three blue modules were essentially giant selects that could not accommodate additional data.
Project goalDecrease contacts to customer service and increase retention
Chapter 1
Playing detective
The exact process and timing related to how an Autoship subscription becomes a child order wasn’t widely understood by anyone. I had to do some digging, testing, and circulating to come up with a valid representation of what existed. I came up with the following representative timelines for current, and future state.
Order timing events timeline asset I created to help communicate to stakeholders.
Future state of order timing asset created to communicate to stakeholders the changes to the experience and back end systems needed to move towards an arrives by date model.
This exercise made it clear to the team that shifting the model to Arrives by date (ABD), would increase the relative distance from the date customers were charged to the date the customer was focusing on. In order to alleviate this perception, I needed to more prominently display these other order events in the UI and in our comms.
Chapter 2
Manage Autoship UI updates
Through research, I arrived at a better above the fold experience that clarified Autoship events timing and colocated related controls. I then designed iterative test that built off each other to get to our destination.
Through my IA studies, more structural issue with the page were also revealed. However, my solutions to those problems became another project entirely!
Screens showing the above the fold progression of Manage Autoship, working towards the end result to the far right.
Chapter 3
Autoship communication updates
For many Autoship customers, the way in which they experience Autoship is through our communications. Some customers go as far as “setting it and forgetting it” and rarely go in to edit their orders.
I recognized that simply adding the “arrives by” date to the existing templates without adjustment would be overwhelming. This was especially true for the “order disruption” variants sent to customers in less than ideal states.
Sample of existing email templates showing the unclear hierarchy, and the overwhelming amount of dates for the customer to consider.
Redesigning email headers to accommodate arrives by date
The problem seemed like it could undermine our efforts to bring clarity around Autoship order timing. I convinced PM to let me address the issue.
Wireframe to help determine IA (left) and end result high fidelity design (right).
Chapter 4
End result
This project is ongoing, however the initial phases have been successful and are live on Chewy.com. The final phase, transitioning to ABD is in development.
Before and after for 1 moment in the customer journey, the reminder event.
Before and after for 1 moment in the customer journey, the order creation event.