Gift Sender Flow

Gift Sender Flow

TLDR; Drizly wanted to prioritize gift sending as a top use case for the platform, but the existing experience created a lot of friction and did not surprise or delight customers because it was not differentiated from the core on-demand experience. I led design on the initiative to redesign the entire flow, creating a gifting experience that is intuitive, straightforward, and memorable. I worked cross-functionally with product, analytics, and engineering to understand the problem, identify the major pain points and opportunity areas, and iterate on solutions, ultimately streamlining the checkout process and adding personal touches, leading to an estimated $2 million improvement and building the foundation for the rest of the gifting experience.

Product Design

March 2022 - August 2022

Business Context

Going into 2022 & following the acquisition by Uber, Drizly decided to shift focus away from purely an on-demand, need-it-now, consumer and instead prioritize "non-core" modes of shopping, of which gifting was the top priority.

The word from on high: burn it down

"We use the words "non-core" to focus on how we make it obvious in everything we do that Drizly is about more than the convenience of delivery. This is THE challenge; building Drizly to be the preferred destination for shopping the unique category that is alcohol. We have to think big and take some big product, ops, and marketing swings in this pursuit: our branding, our copy, our creative, our level of customer support, in which retailers Drizly will work with and service levels we'll now tolerate, and most importantly, in what our product demonstrates to consumers. We cannot afford to get 2% better across everything we do if we're to be successful -- we need to pick 1-2 product directions and get 5x better."

Team

Product Designer (Me)

Product Manager

Data Analyst

UX Researcher

Engineers (4)

As the product designer leading the charge to revamp our gifting experience, I worked with analytics and UX research to define the problem our users were facing, generated potential solutions and evaluated them against the needs of the business by collaborating with product, settled on a recommendation for the designs, and coordinated with engineering to bring it to life.

Competitive Landscape

I examined the competitive landscape of gifting online, including traditional e-commerce, high end alcohol, and on demand delivery.

Comeptitor/Comparator Analysis

Research objective: Find out what consumers like, dislike, want, and struggle with when going through the gifting experience on our site and competitor sites

Key research questions:

• Do people want to be able to send personalized gifts?
• Are people willing to pay for personalized gifts (gift wrap, notes, etc.)?
• What is clear and/or confusing about the gifting experience?
• Do people engage or care about add-ons?
• Mixed gift bags vs. one item?

Method: Unmoderated user study conducted on UserTesting.com's platform.

Participants: 5 total - 3 male, 2 female

Inspiration

For inspiration I looked at both alcohol and non-alcohol experiences, ranging from traditional e-commerce to on-demand delivery platforms. There was an interesting mix of up-front gift selection and functional checkout inspiration.

Existing experience

The existing checkout flow required users to know both the email and phone number of their recipient and it split the recipient info into confusing sub-steps, leading to a large drop off in the checkout funnel at this step. It also allowed senders to choose between letting the recipient schedule the delivery and a "surpise delivery," which has been known to cause numerous customer service issues when recipients don't end up being home.

The iOS experience suffered from the same issues, albeit in a different order. The sender information was grouped with the gift note for the recipient, which led to senders mistakenly entering their own info in the recipient info.

Data

Examining the data around gift sending revealed that gifting has grown as a percentage of orders YoY, but that the customer service contact rate was high, indicating users having issues with the experience. We also saw that gift senders weren't returning to the platform and that recipients weren't converting to be customers themselves.

Pain point analysis

I mapped out the existing flow for users marking their order as a gift in checkout, showing the pain points where users are directed away from checkout and forced to go backwards to enter recipient information before proceeding. In cases where they have to change the address, they may be forced all the way back to cart. We also found evidence that people may know their friends' or families' phone numbers, but not their email addresses.

Detailed flow with supporting data.

Key problems

Based on the data and input from key stakeholders, I identified a handful of key problems. Many of them are addressed in this work, but some are covered in other projects.

Brainstorm

I facilitated a virtual brainstorming session that involved stakeholders and subject matter experts from all across Drizly, including members of leadership and CX representatives, in order to paint a complete picture of gifting.

Affinity Diagram

New ideas were thought of and expansions to existing concepts were explored. Stakeholders all felt that they were able to influence the direction of gifting and the solutions generated were used to inspire / guide planning conversations for future states.

Opportunity Areas

Building off the key problems, after the braintorm I identified many areas of opportunity. Again, not all of them are reflected in this project, but all are in flight one way or another.

Designs

Dovetailing off the streamlined checkout work, I wanted to simplify the gift sending process into 1 single step users could easily understand. I organized the info into recipient info, sender info, and order execution. We also added the digital occasion card selection, and removed the option for surprise gifts. Lastly, email address was made optional. You can view this work live on www.drizly.com when you send a gift.

Early drafts

Initially I thought about separating the gifting info from the checkout step, making it an interstitial space between cart and placing the order. The idea was to avoid confusion between the recipient info and the sender info and make the review step truly just "review," with no actions needed.

Ultimately this version felt convoluted when the user needed to make any edits to their selections, where on iOS it was more natural to go backwards, on web it felt clunky and disjointed. User research also showed that people were frustrated with the number of discrete steps, so I made the choice to integrate all the info into one page, organized by type of information.

Final designs

Results

Due to timeline constraints and confidence in the changes (largely spurred by the success of streamlined checkout), we did not A/B test this feature. Our data analytics team has not yet completed formal analysis, however back of the napkin math comparing the month before this launched and the time since seem to indicate a decrease in drop off rate during our checkout funnel.

We immediately saw people begin to use the digital cards in the new sender flow. Every single card has been selected (beer the least often, as it's hardly ever gifted, fun fact) and sentiment analysis of the gift messages indicate people are choosing the "correct" matching card for their occasion. We also saw a reduction in void rate when we removed surprise gifts. We did not directly A/B test the changes to the sender flow, but the performance of the cards seems to indicate it's being well utilized.

Next steps

Now that we've simplified the functional checkout experience for gift senders, we are embarking on improving the entire funnel.

Learnings

This initiative was the first that I've owned completely, end to end. Through the process I was able to grow in a few key Korn Ferry leadership capabilities:

Related projects