PDP, Simplified (Team)
Problem
How might we improve our browsing experience for potential customers from new acquisition channels?
Approach
I led discussions with executive sponsors, leading to an approved design sprint proposal. I planned, participated and co-created prototypes in the design sprint.
Impact
We shipped the first features in six weeks. These features contributed to a 25% decline in paid search CPAs — within two weeks of launch.
Why Update Our First-Time Browse Experience?
Grove historically acquired customers through high-context, influencer marketing. A trusted person would describe our values and service, while showing off their favorite products from our catalog.
The majority of our onboarding was designed around these users who had lots of prior knowledge about what they were signing up for.
Now, Grove planned to invest marketing budget in organic and paid search channels. Prior user research showed that SEO customers were going to look and act differently than our historical customer.
So, it was time to invest in the user experience.
The goal of this project was to develop concepts that supported the needs of these new potential customers — and launch experiments as soon as possible to test their efficacy.
Client
Grove Collaborative
Duration
8 weeks (Oct.-Nov 2021)
My Role
Design Leader. Sprint Advocate, Planner, Participant, Prototyper
Team
2 Product Managers, 3 Growth Marketers, 2 Designers, 1 User Researcher, 3 Executive Sponsors
Design Approach & Challenges
I led problem-framing discussions with Product and Marketing leadership, culminating in an approved design sprint proposal. During the design sprint, I participated in the entire week, consulted the facilitator and co-created the final prototype with another designer.
Challenges
How do you ease the fear of wasting time and effort?
Fluctuating business metrics made this effort more urgent. The idea of taking an entire scrum team off projects for 1 week made the team anxious.
How did I mitigate?
Partnered with a marketing leader to persuade company leadership that high risk activities lead to high rewards,
Framed the design sprint as a way to “storm” the problem and de-risk the solution, a method for real-time collaboration with our most important stakeholders;
Limited the sprint participant list to those most knowledgeable of the problem space, and
Supported product manager as generated quarter-long roadmap from sprint outputs.
How do you ease the fear of the unknown?
Grove had never done a design sprint before and cross-functional stakeholders were highly involved in product development. While design had been trusted with other challenging projects, this approach had not been tested at Grove before.
How did I mitigate?
Outlined the costs and timeline, including different facilitation approaches.
Coached executive stakeholders through process of defining the sprint’s design challenge — ensuring it was narrow enough to prototype and broad enough for creative solutions.
The Design Sprint
Our Challenge
How might we recreate the ‘Grove first box magic’ in search channels during first order?
Our Goal
Multiply conversion by helping every product-first visitor quickly find a product they want and get them excited (delighted!) to buy it from Grove today.
The Participants
The 5-day design sprint engaged most key departments at Grove (Marketing, Physical Products, Engineering, Customer Support, Design, Product Management, Analytics, and User Research); some were participants, others gave lightning talks on their specialty.
The Logistics
The team worked remotely throughout the entire sprint, leveraging Miro as a digital whiteboard and breakout rooms for small group exercises. We also got executive support to remove participants from ongoing projects so they were entirely focused on the design sprint during that week.
Days 1-3: Journey Mapping to Find Our Focus
The first half of the week was spent outlining the potential customer journey (based on these new entry points) and prioritizing touchpoints for ideation.
The “Whirlpool” Stage
The team focused on this point of the shopping phase that because of the non-linear, follow-my-curiosity approach that was so distinct from previous customers.
Some customer considerations at play at this time:
a person’s ability to navigate the catalog (what do they sell here? do I buy these types of things?),
assess products (what does this do? do I know this brand?),
understand store policies (how long is shipping? how do returns work?), and
anticipate value or costs (is this a good price? is there a discount?)
Day 4: Bringing the Prototype to Life
We made the following improvements for our prototype:
Show, don’t tell. Enlarging images for the product and similar carousels made it so users could read product labels.
Make values scannable. Product values badges highlighted “Leaping Bunny Certified” (i.e. cruelty free) and “Made in the USA”.
Highlight subscriptions. Testing communication of our subscription model at first checkout.
Streamline sections. Collapsing sections shortened page scrolling significantly.
Choose-your-adventure navigation. Category breadcrumbs, product carousels, and links to category pages offered lots of discovery outlets.
Integrate social proof. User-generated review content and social media streams helped build credibility and assuaged concerns.
Day 5: A Mix of Wins & Learnings
We conducted 5 concept tests with target potential customers. The main goals of our testing were to find out:
What is user’s first impression of Grove and the products?
How do users engage with or react to added content?
Have we addressed immediate concerns or questions about Grove or the product?
What is user’s preferred navigation method?
In general, users found the information helpful and the visual design attractive, trustworthy and “natural feeling”.
✅ Large images
✅ Collapsed sections
✅ Scannable value badges and plastic free messaging
✅ Subscribe and Save messaging
Unfortunately, users didn’t see our additional information below the fold since they didn’t end up there and had outstanding questions about shipping.
❌ Choose-your-adventure navigation
❌ Integrating social proof
❌ Streamlined scrolling
Post-Sprint Experiments
The team reviewed usability test findings and planned their roadmap around effort and level of feature validation. For example, large images would be an easier design and engineering lift so it was shipped sooner than value-based badges.
The growth scrum team shipped two A/B tests measuring first-order conversion within six weeks.
Test 1: Accordion sections and larger images
While the test resulted in a neutral impact to order conversion, but the team decided to release it because it was supported their PDP vision.
Test 2: Shipping details above the fold
The test showed slight negative impact to order conversion; so, the team pulled the concept and planned to return to it for future iterations.
Impact
While expanded traffic volume muddled attribution, our updates did contribute to a 25% decline in paid search CPAs — two weeks after test launch.
Afterwards, I was approached by multiple product managers eager to run their own sprints. While it was not suitable for all their use cases, the team was infinitely more confident in the value of this method.
