Summary
As of 2017, Amazon was running 5 overlapping business models: Amazon Fresh, Prime Now, Prime Pantry, Whole Foods, and Amazon Go. Amazon Fresh was meant to be a full-service digital grocery store offering Delivery and Pickup in select cities domestically and internationally. Prime Now was meant to be a smaller footprint with faster 1-2 hour shipping speeds, again focused on key high-density markets like New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Prime Pantry was a national service that shipped shelf-stable goods in standard parcels along with any other typical Amazon purchase. Whole Foods was acquired with established brand awareness, physical stores, and physical infrastructure. Finally, Amazon Go was created as a smaller footprint store that focused primarily on building "Just walk out" technologies, that also offered fresh to-go lunches and dinners for heavy foot traffic areas like downtown Seattle and even airports. At that point, Amazon's grocery services hit an inflection point and a consolidation strategy was key to move forward. I won't go into detail for how that all went down, but you can catch up on this CNBC article about "The Bake Off" which summarizes how the mergers were decided upon at the S-team level. As a result, Amazon Fresh and Prime Now organizations merged to focus on Ultrafast delivery for Amazon Fresh (which is what this initiative is focused on), with the ultimate plan to sunset the Prime Now brand. Simultaneously we also started to form integrations to also launch Ultrafast delivery at Whole Foods while also building up what would become Amazon Fresh's physical store plans that would be later launched in 2020.
So, we had a lot going on. My focus area was to look both strategically for leadership on what an Ultrafast Amazon Fresh would look like, as well working with another designer on the Northstar approach at how Amazon Fresh, Prime Now, Whole Foods, and other third party grocers might co-exist on Amazon.com. Amidst the chaos and unknowns, I set out to provide a narrative for Ultrafast delivery, show extensibility for Whole Foods and other Pickup models, and keep my sanity in the process.
Business objectives
First task was to work with my product managers to be clear I had a firm grasp on the top objectives. From that, we arrived at the following goals to be arrived at over a 1-2 year period:
- Launch delivery speeds within 1-2 hours for Amazon Fresh
- Launch delivery speeds within 1-2 hours for Whole Foods Market as a template (allowing extensibility for third party stores)
- Launch Whole Foods pickup with "On my way" feature
- Launch ability to pickup multiple orders at once, including groceries AND parcels (i.e. brown boxes)
Scope
- Revised and enhanced slot selection flow
- Introduction of Cart of Carts page
- Revised and enhanced Amazon Fresh cart page
- Revised and enchanced Post Order flow
Defined UX questions
- How do we communicate value of delivery speed in post-order space?
- How do we scale the design to accommodate multiple third party extensibility?
- How do we scale our solution to allow for either delivery or pickup?
- How can we scale pickup to allow for picking up multiple orders?
Minimal lovable product vision
To start this year, I was one of 2 designers tapped to look at the future of Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods. I was asked to define the future for Amazon Fresh and my counterpart and I were both responsible for thinking about Whole Foods and how we might extend that experience as a template for all new third party retailers that we might onboard. We spent a week brainstorming and laying out a vision for this work in preparation for a Senior Vice President review with Jeff Wilke, who was CEO of Amazon's Worldwide Consumer business, and Senior Vice President review Steve Kessel, who was in charge of all Amazon Go and physical store launches.
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Cart of carts concept
Lorem ipsum - I had previously pitched and gained approval to move from the post order experience that existed only for Amazon Fresh, to instead utilize the standard Amazon.com experience to reduce redundancy and the extra tech lift require to maintain 2 similar (but different) tech stack and UX. Because of that work, I started looking at what areas of the currernt experience that made sense to focus on to achieve our goals.
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Refining the Post Order experience
I had previously pitched and gained approval to move from the post order experience that existed only for Amazon Fresh, to instead utilize the standard Amazon.com experience to reduce redundancy and the extra tech lift require to maintain 2 similar (but different) tech stack and UX. Because of that work, I started looking at what areas of the currernt experience that made sense to focus on to achieve our goals.
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Post Order Step 1: Remove the "Milestone" card
My hunch here was that the milestone tracker takes up a ton of space and has redundancy of information within it. Again, I was able to collect a few datapoints to support my hypothesis:
- While the Milestone tracker is useful, the milestones will happen very quickly within a 1-2 hour delivery. I confirmed that many of the existing milestones would occur in minutes, rather than hours/days for traditional parcel shipments.
- Removing the card would allow for important information below the fold to take a higher priority.
- Using Prime Now data, I noted that 90% of customers were choosing same-day, with 50% of those customers choosing next available time slot.
Objectively, I was able to these datapoints to convince my product manager, our leadership and tech teams that we could move forward and take a calculated risk to simplify the experience to display pertinent milestones within the hero card.
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Post Order Step 2: Lead with progress tracker on map when deliveries are en route
Again, utilizing a mental model of a customer that is expecting extremely quick timelines, I hypothesized that we should utilize a progress tracker (i.e. pizza tracker) that our customers have grown accustomed to. I also noted that:
- 80% of all customer service calls are around "where is my stuff?".
- Thinking of those customers, I estimated that we could further bury order details within the hero card using "Progressive Disclosure" as a best practice.
- Again, rather than a milestone tracker, a stateful hero card can continue to elevate milestones while dynamically loading just-in-time information directly below allows for status without extra space requirement.
Objectively, I was able to these datapoints to convince my product manager, our leadership and tech teams that we could move forward and take a calculated risk to combine the best data from the Milestone Card and simplify to just show the latest milestone achieved in the hero card.
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Post Order Step 3: Allow for extensibility with Pickup model
Looking at the existing Prime Now pickup feature, we were asked to find a way to scale our work to include for our V1. Considering how were thinking about a card-based solution, it would be easy to extend to allow for some of it's functionality. I also noted that:
- New integration needed to maintain <2 minute pickup SLA.
- Pickup use-cases would need to further extend the stateful hero card and subsequent informational cards below.
- Current Prime Now flow included odd separation of actions and information, so this was an opportunity to condense location access flow into a single card.
- This work underscored the need for card-based system and through pitching to dev teams, allowed them to continue on their own codebase (rather than shared), which allows them to deliver faster.
Objectively, I was able to these datapoints along with multiple design iterations and review with partner teams to convince my product manager, our leadership and tech teams that we could move forward and take a calculated risk to make these simplifications while meeting the objective to allow for Pickup workflow.
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Post Order Step 4: Allow for the extensibility of multiple order types (i.e. grocery AND parcel) for new Amazon Fresh physical stores
Simultaneously with the above work, I was looped into a new secret "Mendel" project which would eventually become the new Amazon Fresh physical stores that started launching on September 17, 2020. Again, going back to our scalable model, I was able to extend our workflow to accommodate and provide further improvements beyond our first launches. I also noted that:
- Parcel and grocery orders will need to stay separated. Goal would be to find a way to face-out individual orders as a single pickup.
- The difficulty with facing out as a single Pickup creates odd parent/child relationship, creating a potentially confusing experience. Goal would be find a reconfiguration that reduces confusion.
Objectively, I was able to these datapoints along with multiple design iterations and review with Mendel leadership as well as with our Core Post Order team to convince my product manager, our leadership and tech teams that we could move forward and take a calculated risk to make these improvements as our standard experience for all new grocery + parcel patterns.
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Final outcomes
We successfully launched 1-2 hour delivery for AmazonFresh in the Fall of 2018 and launched the Whole Foods experience to over 500 stores later that year. It was immediately seen as a success, driving revenue and customer satisfaction. We were able to maintain Prime Now speeds for pickup at less than 2 minutes, maintain 90% of customer selecting same-day delivery/50% next available slot, and drive incremental revenue for premium slots. Additionally, my work for the AmazonFresh physical store launched on September 17, 2020 at the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles and has since rolled out to over 40 stores both domestically and internationally.
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Northstar visioning for the Post Order experience
Not being content with that success, I had a growing inclination that the post order experience was becoming largely another communication channel, versus just a few pages in the experience. I decided to follow my gut and work through a few concepts that I had been considering and prepared a pitch deck to developers and leadership to drive toward a new initiative that our business might invest in. A few thoughts I had were:
- How might we consider milestones as conversational events? Does that presentation meet or exceed customer's expectations?
- How might we weave additional channels into this experience, i.e. Pickup prompts, In-store shopping, Customer Service, picture on delivery, etc.?
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