Creating Opportunity To Capture Missed Add-On Sales With Protection Hub Designs
Role: Lead UX / UI Designer Skills: User Experience, Wireframing, Competitive Analysis Time: 2022
What’s the opportunity?
The Walmart Protection arm of the business partners with Allstate to offer protection plans for a slew of items including TVs, radios, home goods, lighting, etc. The historically profitable and highly successful business has been moved below the fold in a recent redesign and found itself losing millions of dollars overnight.
Customers also began noticing that they were not been able to get the protection coverage they needed. Consumer feedback more frequently highlighted feelings of surprise and frustration that the plans that they usually added with ease were now difficult to locate and manage.
The challenge came as a result of a design system migration, which included a tightening of the “Buy Box”. The old layout of the website was focused on a wider “Buy Box”, which allowed for more visibility on Protection Plan services. Many updates and functionality upgrades were delayed by a year due to this design system shift, including the Protection Hub which would allow the customers to have a more holistic experience between their digital and in-store Protection purchases. While Walmart customers had an updated, fine-tuned experience to add insurance pre purchase, they had virtually no way to add insurance products post purchase. Herein lies the annual $60+ million dollar opportunity.
The Challenge
The Protections Hub Redesign came as a part of the complete overhaul of the Protections experience, starting from the very beginning of customers adding insurance plans to their purchases. (Project: Redesign of Item Page)
I set out to answer “How might we design a centralized environment for all things in the Protection umbrella to make the process of buying and claiming insurance much more user centric?”
In order to wrap the eco-system of Protections offerings into one section, the business team proposed to create a Protections Hub which would have multiple functions including:
Enhancing our customers’ ability to find their protection plans in one space
Adding capabilities for customers to link items that were purchased in-store with protection plans to their digital accounts. This was previously a functionality that didn’t exist. Customers would buy items in-store, unauthenticated, and the only proof of protection would reside in the form of a physical paper receipt.
Improving access and transparency for customers to their Protections information on covered products
The Hub would act like one centralized source of information for all current and future Protection products.
Design Process
In order to fully understand the scope of the project, I set out to learn, listen, and finally implement. When I begin a project, I:
identify the main users and business stakeholders. I often will conduct stakeholder interviews if I need further information about specific expertise. I work closely with my product manager to scope out the project to make sure we are capturing all user scenarios.
in this step I am careful to consider other teams’ inputs as they may have dependencies on my work, and vice versa. I also set up time to seek insights from fellow design colleagues on work they may have in progress that may impact the thinking on my own design work-stream.
work to understand the full background and scope of the project. I want to learn as much about the current and potential future offering as possible (in this case to know what current insurance plans are available, how are they claimed, how costly they are to our customers, when our customers claim them, expiration dates, etc.)
conduct or lean on user research. In this case, Walmart provided research via analytics collected and customer feedback from users that wanted to claim insurance. I also performed my own research in the form of competitive analysis, customer journey mapping, and persona creation.
begin the ideation process by creating sketches, wireframes, and a framework for the critique process with my stakeholders as well as my design colleagues. Here I utilize previous research and inputs from users and business stakeholders, and eventually blend that feedback into more high fidelity work with UI iterations. This step takes the longest as the details get ironed out through many rounds and paths of ideation.
design, conduct critiques, design, and get critiques some more. The process bounces around until I have high fidelity work that I can “tour” around with other teams in marketing, business management, engineering, accessibility, content, or other design teams.
put the finishing touches on the work by having one last critique before finalizing the visuals in Figma with clear documentation for engineers. Here I engage in the handoff process with tech teams. Usually I host meetings with various teams so they can see how the screens move and flow together.
work with the QA team once the designs are developed to make sure the work is created as it was designed.
engage in final production launch and oversee any usability testing or analytics work to ensure successful final product launch, to understand early customer feedback, and to eventually begin the process anew with further functionality enhancements and improvements over time.
Customer Journey: a deep-dive into my own user research (#3 above)
While I was familiar with the digital side of the user experience, the in-person experience escaped me. To ensure success of the Protection Hub Design, I wanted to learn more about the in-person experience and how it would interact with a Digital Protection Hub. I traveled to my local WalMart to gather some of my own first-hand research:
How do customers know that items can be protected? Are there any marketing signs? Are customers able to tell which products are eligible for protection?
Do customers have an understanding of what Protections offer when they sign up?
What was the experience of adding the Protection plan to an item?
Did our customers have a thorough understanding of where they can access the information about claiming the protection plan if the time comes?
Result
When the Protections Hub came to life, it became a thoughtful approach to offering customers just enough information, without overwhelming them with unnecessary, irrelevant information.
Depending on their shopping behaviors, customers would be alerted to the items that they might have purchased but didn’t add insurance products to.
Both top sections would lead the customer to a hidden “Add a Plan” page which would also be accessible from all of the Communications emails. The new page would offer all customers a way to add Protection Plans that range from 2 to 4 offerings depending on the item.
I leveraged Walmart’s “Buy Now” pattern in order to allow customers to easily, and quickly add Plans, which they would then be able to see in their Protections Hub. This project was a result of collaboration with multiple teams, various stakeholders, and a lot of thinking about how to make the process simple and efficient for the users.
The designs above feature various entry points towards the “My Plans” or “Add a Plan” pages including:
The happy path from the mobile app Account
The various Order Detail Page entry points, and various states
Email communications customers receive when they purchase items.
Impact
The designs are now in production for more than 50% of the population and will allow customers to get add-ons for a variety of items ranging from technology to home-remodeling. There is a significant improvement in Web, iOS, and Android ranging from 5% to 36% conversion rate on various platforms. The analytics of which A/B/C/D option has outperformed its competition is still being tested.
Going forward, Walmart will expand on its Protections offerings by offering subscriptions to the customers, utilizing the Hub for upselling.
This year was dedicated to fixing and improving the the existing experience.
I purchased items digitally for delivery, in-store with the help of a customer service representative, and with self-checkout. All three experiences were somewhat different.
Quick insights
I learned that in many cities (Philly included), a customer service representative has to retrieve the product from behind a glass, not allowing the customer to really learn about the product ahead of time, and putting a sense of pressure on the customer since you’ve already used up the energy of sales representatives.
There weren’t any signs posted for which items were eligible for Protections, and the only way for me to know was by searching the items in my Walmart app.
[Belted experience 🙋♀️] Many items in store that customers expect to have Protection plans are hidden behind a glass case (due to theft). There isn’t much marketing, or any information about available plans.
The way that customers learned that the product was eligible was by a notification popping up on the screen, coupled with the customer service representative asking me verbally if I would like to sign up for Protections. She offered a little bit of knowledge as to the benefits when I asked.
[Self-checkout 🛒] The process was simple, but I did have an incredibly helpful customer service assisting me when my screen froze. I received a large screen modal that alerted me to the fact that a Protection Plan is available.
The main difference between both in-store purchases and online are that I as a user am prompted to log in online which makes the relationship easier to build between the customer account and the Protections they purchased. To connect an in-store, unauthenticated Protection Plan add-on, customers would have to call Walmart or scan their receipt from a difficult-to-access part of the app.
Another consideration is that for digital experiences, specifically for the Protections Hub, our Business partners wanted to offer two plans instead of one like Walmart has in store, and like most of the competitors have.
I coupled the in-store experience with looking through customer reviews Walmart received and the process illustrated that customers were generally content with Protections, until it came time to claim their Plan if their TV broke.
A really important blind spot was revealed. If a customer purchases an item in-store, but they were un-authneitcated, meaning they were not logged into their account and paid with their Walmart Pay, the only way to link their digital account to their Protection Plan was through keeping the physical, paper receipt. If you lose the receipt as a customer, you lose proof that you have Protections added to your purchase.
So if your television breaks after a year of purchase but you misplaced the receipt, or the ink faded, or your dog chewed the receipt up, you have no options but to go and purchase it again.
Business explorations
I had to understand how to delicately balance out all the various entry points and how to lead the customer to their protections.
A question I started to explore was, whether the Protection Hub would be a source of loss, or could it also be a place for financial gain? Was there a way to not only offer customers a way to claim their insurance offerings, but to allow them to extend the lifetime value of their items by signing up for Protections from the Hub and other entry points?
When working with our various stakeholders, I wanted to understand what was important, to whom, and whose voice will be the loudest?
There were several entry points for customers to add Protections to their items including:
Communication emails that were sent out to customers post-purchase
Order detail page which was essentially a digital receipt, and detailed the information about the item, delivery information, price, etc.
Protection Hub which was not yet built out yet, and would mostly be accessible through the Account
Together with the product manager, we mapped out the relationships between the entry points and the Hub to understand if we were allowing the customer, at various points of the experience to add more Protections to their purchases, both pre and post-purchase.
