Buy Now Redesign

An evaluation of the Best Buy “Buy Now” Checkout Redesign in collaboration with Best Buy UX Design/Research

Project Type: Mobile App/Web Feature Redesign

Tools: Figma, Miro, DScout, Confluence

Timeline: Jan 8th, 2024 - Feb 16th, 2024

Contributors:

  • Teddy Noun - Discovery | Research Plan Creation
  • Zaheer Elly - Usability Testing Moderation
  • Karli Seman - Clickable Prototype Creation

Overview

Problem Statement

Best Buy’s “Buy Now” feature is not optimized in ways that users would expect, and lacks many of the enhancements that are present in other modern express checkout flows. Users view the “Buy Now” experience as being overly cluttered which adds unnecessary friction to their checkout experience.

Proposed Solution

Redesign the “Buy Now” checkout flow in order to reduce clutter, adhere to design best-practices, and more closely align with users’ express checkout expectations.

Key Research Objectives

  1. Determine if customers can purchase an item using the Buy Now Redesign and associated capabilities
  2. Understand how well the Buy Now Redesign and associated capabilities meet user expectations

Background

What is "Buy Now"?

Best Buy’s “Buy Now” feature was originally implemented in 2017 as an express checkout experience intended to cut down on extra steps, and reduce friction during the checkout process for signed-in customers. Today, a user will click “Buy Now” instead of “Add to Cart” and will be taken to a Fast-Track checkout window rather than their Cart & Classic Checkout Experience.
While “Buy Now” has seen success since it’s initial implementation, driving $106 M in revenue in 2023, there is opportunity to increase conversion rate by replacing the current “Fast Track” experience with one that is more optimized for faster checkout, and can be leveraged across many different Best Buy Experiences to ensure a consistent user experience.
  • Conversion Rate for Buy Now is currently at 68%
  • 15.22% of users leave Buy Now without continuing their session
  • 4.58% of users leave Buy Now to go to Cart (likely to compare or review their other items)
  • 11.22% of users leave Buy Now to go to the Best Buy home page

KPIs:

  • Buy Now Conversion Rate
  • User satisfaction

Users

Who are our users?

Based off of site analytics and extensive market research, the customer segment which most often interacts with the “Buy Now” feature is “Segment 1”. This customer segment was identified by the Best Buy Marketing team and is embodied by Ana, our user persona.

Discovery

Identifying Areas of Improvement

To identify areas in need of improvement, I conducted a heuristic analysis of the current “Buy Now” experience. This analysis uncovered several sections on the review page of the “Buy Now” flow that were not critical to the checkout process, and only served to cause unneeded cognitive load to users who are trying to checkout as quickly as possible.

Heuristics

Overview of Buy Now Order Review (Current State):

Best Buy’s Fast Track checkout flow is a one page review checkout process with all order information summarized and editable on the review page. It has a floating “place order” button which gives the user the ability to complete their order without scrolling to the bottom of the page if they choose.

Editable information all has clear CTA (call to action) copy, however, the review page is long and difficult to scan. This feeling is exaggerated when the user edits their information because the screen extends showing the additional input fields along with the rest of the order information. This could cause unnecessary cognitive load for the user.

Not only is the page difficult to scan, it’s not clear if each section is highlighting the order details that users most want to review.

Competitive Analysis

In addition to the heuristic analysis, I also conducted a competitive analysis to identify any features or best-practices that could assist in de-cluttering the “Buy Now” experience. Four of Best Buy’s top competitor’s express checkout experiences were analyzed. Key insights and takeaways can be seen below.
Amazon
Apple
Shop
Walmart

Prototyping

Explorations

Several design patterns and features identified during the competitive analysis were explored further in order to determine if they were feasible to implement in the redesign.

The bottom-drawer style layout used by Walmart’s express checkout was built out within Figma, but it was ultimately decided that a full-page experience would be more feasible due to technical limitations and dependancies.

The competitive analysis also revealed that many of Best Buy’s competitors added the “Buy Now” item to cart if the user left the checkout process before completion. This will be further explored the future as it was slightly out of scope for this redesign.

Buy Now Flow

Based on the insights gathered from explorations, competitive analyses, and the heuristic analysis of the current “Buy Now” flow, it became clear that the redesigned experience should have a single review page in order to minimize perceived latency for the user, and it should be simplified so that the user is able to checkout more efficiently.

Side by Side

Using the redesigned user flow, the mid-fi prototype was created by Best Buy UX Designer, Karli Seman with the intention to use it in moderated usability testing. One of the biggest differences between the current view and the redesign was that input fields were separated into bottom-drawer interactions in order to reduce cognitive load for users in the redesigned “Buy Now” review page.

Clickable Prototype

Testing & Iterating

What do we want to learn?

In order to evaluate if the redesigned “Buy Now” review page better aligned to user expectations, user feedback was needed. An evaluative usability study was conducted in collaboration with the Best Buy UX Research team to determine if the redesigned “Buy Now” flow was truly optimized.

Key Objectives:

  • Determine if users can purchase an item through the "Buy Now" flow and associated capabilities
  • Understand how well the Buy Now flow and associated capabilities met user expectations

Researcher: Zaheer Elly

Method: Moderated usability testing & user interviews lasting 20 mins

Number of Participants: 6

Participant Criteria: Best Buy Segment 1 customers

Timeframe: Feb 5th, 2024 - Feb 16th, 2024

Approach:

One-on-one (participant and researcher) in-depth interviews lasting up to 20 minutes were conducted via Dscout.

Participants interacted with the mid-fi clickable prototype and answered a series of post-task questions.

Findings

Usability
Post-Task Questions

Key Takeaways

The insights gathered from usability testing indicated that users were easily able to complete an order with “Buy Now” despite some initial hesitation to click the “Buy Now” button. When asked why, some users responded that they were worried about immediately completing their purchase without being able to review.

When initially provided with the scenario, only 2 of 6 participants clicked “Buy Now” on the PDP. However, after completing the redesigned “Buy Now” checkout flow and the usability tasks, 5 out of 6 participants stated that they were very confident that they could rely on Best Buy’s “Buy Now” experience to make a quick purchase. This spoke to the overall trustworthiness that users felt towards the redesigned experience and indicated that the redesign generally aligned with their expectations.

The users’ desire to review their order was a prominent theme within the study. The users’ focus on order review validated our decision to maintain the single review page model which is already used in the “current” pre-redesign experience.

Results

The results of this usability study will be used to inform future enhancements to the "Buy Now" express checkout experience. Once the experience is refined, we hope to position "Buy Now" across a variety of places across the Bestbuy.com such as "Best Buy Drops", our PLPs, and promotional pages.

The results of this study also served to inform key decisions and enhancements to a similar checkout experience, the Fast Track Checkout Experience on the Best Buy mobile app and website. The Fast Track Checkout redesign achieved an overall 4.5% increase in conversion rate determined by post-launch A/B testing.
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Upon completion of the research study, I had gained the trust of my UX manager, which enabled me to take on an even larger role in an end-to-end evaluation study of the Best Buy Classic Cart & Checkout Experience.
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