Challenge

With shopping flows and a design system for Sprint.com already established, finding room for improvement meant looking at specific elements to determine their impact. The device purchase experience was more successful than previous iterations, but customers occasionally struggled with selectors that had been warped by business needs they weren’t originally built to accommodate. This was especially true in a mobile environment. The goal was to understand if new design patterns could improve user understanding and success through usability testing.

My role

I designed new system elements, including selectors and product cards, adjusted the user flow and built detailed prototypes for usability testing. I also wrote the test plan, in concert with UX Research, that would help us uncover our desired learnings.

To comply with Sprint's non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted any confidential information, including site performance and customer data, from this case study. All opinion is my own.

Approach

In the existing device purchase flow there are lots of options available and choices to make, so our primary focus with the new designs was providing confidence to users. Our hypothesis was that putting more control in the users’ hands would help accomplish this. This meant removing the pre-selection state from selectors, as well as employing the concept of the “micro-yes”; giving users more, smaller choices to make that ultimately lead to a successful journey.

Selector patterns

Through site performance data and earlier usability testing, we knew the current selector patterns had some specific short-comings that we hoped a new design system could mitigate. Selectors often contained too much information, the pre-selection state was not always obvious and it could be difficult to see which choices had been made further down the flow. With the new selectors, we wanted to evolve the design system elements to feel more app-like and a bit more modern. We also made a drastic reduction in the noise within selectors to make them consistent throughout the purchase flow, while moving descriptions to accessible yet out-of-the-way locations.

Testing plan

Since the majority of the traffic to Sprint.com was from mobile, usability testing was designed to take place on a participants' mobile device. The sessions were unmoderated, including 12 non-Sprint users with a mix of age and gender, in which they were taken through both the current experience and the newly designed flow. The questions of interest included how well participants understood which items were selectable, which items were already selected, how effectively promotions were associated to selectors and if participants could effectively edit their choices throughout the process.

Result

Reimagining of the design system patterns resulted in cleaner, more modern and more attractive selectors that were pulled through the adjusted device purchase flow. By reducing the text density on each screen and creating micro-yes interaction points, moving through the prototype was a faster process compared to the current experience, with users understanding choices more clearly. Some testing highlights supporting the new design patterns include:

• 75% of participants viewed the new selectors as more clearly identifying selectable items

• 92% of participants viewed the new design as more clearly indicating which items were already selected

• 100% of participants were able to edit their choices easily throughout the new user flow

Sprint / Device Shopping