Building the Future of Checkout

Best Buy's previous checkout redesign had failed its A/B test. This time the direction was validated in discovery, but it still had to hold up through execution.

Discovery aligned the Commerce View, Payments, and Fulfillment teams on a single direction: a one-page accordion built around four customer needs, confidence, reviewability, control, and transparency. That first half of the process is covered in Defining the Future of Checkout.

My role was to protect that direction through execution, and turn it into a checkout that met the four customer needs and supported a business case the organization could commit to as the future of checkout.

A critical turning point occurred when I proposed interaction changes that better supported customer needs but expanded implementation scope.

The proposal introduced additional engineering complexity and challenged initial delivery assumptions.

This led to a series of discussions across Product, Engineering, Checkout, Payments, and Fulfillment.

After weighing short-term implementation costs against long-term customer value, the organization aligned around pursuing the stronger experience.

Designing the primary flow was only part of the challenge.

The experience also needed to support dozens of customer scenarios and edge cases.

I partnered closely with the Commerce View (Checkout), Payments and Fulfillment teams to ensure consistency across every variation and ensure scenarios across every dimension were supported.

Following implementation, the redesign entered A/B testing against the legacy checkout experience.

The initial results were disappointing.

The redesigned experience showed roughly a 1% decrease in conversion in the web experience, but flat in app.

At first glance, it appeared we had another unsuccessful checkout redesign.

To understand the full impact of the redesign, we looked past the headline conversion number to a focused set of metrics across the funnel.

Rather than immediately abandoning the direction, the team investigated the results more deeply.

As we analyzed the experiment, we uncovered limitations within the testing setup that had not been fully understood before.

With this discovery, along with identification of several bugs, our results proved inconclusive. We needed to iterate the designs, our testing setup, & our measures of success.

The design advanced through iteration, with every decision backed by data.

Each step stays visible and editable while the flow guides customers forward. The direction from discovery, realized in high fidelity.

I worked in tandem with product and engineering to refine the designs while they resolved bugs, and controlled for resellers.

The redesign established a new foundation for checkout at Best Buy.

More importantly, it translated customer insights into a scalable experience capable of supporting the complexity of Best Buy's offerings.

Although validation continues, the organization aligned around this direction as the future of checkout.

Execution required protecting that direction through technical complexity, organizational constraints, and uncertainty.

The challenge was creating a simple, elegant experience on top of an incredibly complex system.

This project reinforced that great product design requires more than interaction design. It requires systems thinking, alignment, and the ability to make thoughtful tradeoffs while staying focused on customer needs.