Target cart & checkout Redesign
Company: Target
Role: Lead Product Designer
During my first year at Target, I was given the opportunity to give the app cart & checkout experience a much-needed face lift on both iOS & Android. The work started as an effort to address the aesthetics & accessibility of the oldest part of the app and ended up having an impact on sales, customer sentiment, and the scalability and efficiency of our design and development processes.
The problem: The UI aesthetic and affordances were far behind the rest of the experience, and the underlying code was being strained as we continued to add new offerings and functionality. This contributed to an inconsistent and disjointed customer shopping and purchasing experience.
A before and after of the checkout view for a Same Day Delivery order on the Target iOS app.
designing for scalability
As the lead on the project, I set out to elevate the design consistency and standards and simplify the checkout process so our guests felt confident as they moved through the purchasing funnel no matter what surface they were on.
Alongside those guest-centric goals, I was working hard to establish scalable patterns to set the groundwork for future enhancements so we could enable quick iteration & easy collaboration with partner teams.
Cart and checkout view prior to the updates. Note the small cell size, poor accessibility, and hierarchy issues.
building collaboratively
Unsurprisingly there were some features that were dependent on the changes we were rolling out. One example was the launch of Shipt Same Day Delivery on apps. I attended team ceremonies and closely collaborated with designers & engineers from the Target Run team, making sure that we were all building toward the same goal and vision. It was here where my newly formed design patterns were first put to the test and today the app experience is still built off these original patterns.
A shared whiteboard where we collaboratively thought through the updated user journey for someone using the “Order my list” feature.
impact & outcomes
The results of this project were multi-fold:
Over half a percent of improvement to checkout conversion across platforms could be attributed to the updates to the checkout space alone. While I can’t share exact dollar amounts, a half a percent is quite a bit of money when you consider that Target’s annual revenue is ~$100B — any small improvement in this space results in big gains.
~85% of guest feedback was extremely positive (across 10s of thousands of collected feedback submissions), saying the experience was “Quick and easy”.
Developed reusable components like the “standard cell” and “sheet” for Android in collaboration with the Global Design Systems team that enabled faster development for future work.
Redesigned Cart & Checkout Views using new design patterns.
The framework I established for cart & checkout laid the groundwork for future enhancements and new features:
Designed an improved Add to Cart from Saved for Later flow
Improved usability of the Address Verification and Credit Card Compare experiences
Developed a Bulk Actions in Cart feature that allows users to make updates to multiple cart items at once
takeaways
And an unintended side effect of this work is how much the switch to these global components and tokens improved my communication with engineers. In projects following this redesign effort, we found we all spoke the same design and experience language, making decision making, UI QA, and collaboration so much easier.
It’s been exciting to see how this space continues to incrementally improved as the team has built and iterated over the years.