The Nordstrom Product Group wanted to integrate logic into the mobile experience that allowed users to choose which samples they wanted with an order. We wanted to take advantage of the data we had on individual user shopping trends to present them with relevant samples. The product team wanted the free samples to be highly relevant to each individual and to possibly help influence the user towards their next purchase. This feature would be integrated into the iOS experiences on both phone and tablet.
My role as the Senior Mobile UX designer was to work with the product team to design a solution for integrating free samples into the native iOS experience. We wanted to build an experience that helped influenced users into their next purchase by allowing them to choose relevant free samples in their current purchase. We did some initial user research with the UX research team and built user stories based off of that research. Once we had solid user stories, we did some rapid prototyping with our users. We utilized Axure for prototyping and Photoshop and Illustrator for the final designs.
There was an existing checkout experience and we needed to understand how free samples fit within the existing experience. We also needed to maintain a expedient checkout experience and did not want the free sample design to be an impediment. We needed to collaborate with our users to find out what solutions resonated the most with them. We were also able to do some competitive research against other companies such as Macys, Zappos, and others to see what may have been working well for them. This was already being done in person in the retail stores and we were able to do some initial interviews with retail to find out what may work on the digital experience.
We did some initial sketches which lead us to refine our user stories. Once we had confidence in our user stories we were able to produce some higher fidelity wireframes and test the new checkout experience that included free samples.
After the feature had shipped we observed that the free sample experience did help the increase future purchases. The likelihood of a future purchase depended highly on the relevancy of the samples which made the accuracy of the underlying recommendation engine important.
