AfterShip Returns Center
Taking full ownership of the product design, I built a B2B returns solution of e-commerce industry in a scrum team.
About the product
AfterShip Returns Center is a returns solution for e-commerce business. It automates the returns process to streamline customer experience and reduce returns cost. It’s a responsive web application with both customer and retailer web portal. The main features include returns order submission, returns order management, brand and business rules customization.
Mission & achievement
Returns Center started with a free MVP app embedded in Shopify. My mission as a designer owner is to grow it to an independent product with more sophisticated features, which can generate profits from retailer subscription.
Up to now, Returns Center has helped handle thousands of returns for many retailers and customers.
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Team
Product Designer: Tracy Tam
Product Owner: Glen Poon
Engineers: Eric Lea, Victor Zhou, Jesus Garcia, Hong Chan, Abhiroop Bhatnagar
Period
Aug 2017 — Present
Define challenge
Step 1: understand the MVP
I started with understanding why the MVP went successful and what could be done better. This included analyzing both the positive comments and remaining pain points by reviewing the MVP, interviewing with stakeholders as well as collecting feedback from current customers via support tickets.
Step 2: understand our market
After fully understand the current MVP, the stakeholders, the product owner and I hold the Product Planning session for the upcoming product. Via competitor studies, persona and HMW (How might we), we learned about the market needs.
Conclusion
From both preliminary and continuous research, the main challenge goes to cost. The cost we help retailers to save defines how many retailers will pay.
Design strategies
1. Industry level
Standardize returns process to save communication cost.
The target market of Returns Center was defined to be the “Fast Growing” e-commerce brands. From our research, these retailers’ daily operation was highly depending on third-party solutions. And the communication among was extremely low efficiency.
As a result, instead of giving as much flexibility as possible, I designed the best practice for the market which is both efficient and general enough for all kinds of e-commerce business.
2. Product level
Easy-to-customize business rules to save operation cost.
Retailers often have different business rules to automate the returns process. The needs of complex rules vary from brand to brand.
In order to cater to retailers with different levels of needs, I designed a guiding flow, where retailers can find the configurations from easy to difficult, from common to unique.
In this way, retailers who want to start with an easy-setup solution don’t feel overwhelmed. On the other hand, retailers with high demand can configure rules themselves step by step however they like.
Business rules were sorted based on the preliminary result of card sorting, persona and HMW(how might we). After each release, I kept collecting data from Google Spanner to verify the usage of features and adjust furthermore.
3. Interaction level
Optimize every detail to increase daily efficiency.
Some daily operations can’t be replaced by the system. For these actions, improvement of a single click or second matters.
For example, in some circumstances, the returns need to be verified and updated manually. The series of actions include: find the return, verify the return and update the returns status.
With the prototype, I set up an internal testing session comparing the efficiency of each option. Thanks for the quick tests, the most efficient structure was determined.
Digging dipper, internal testing wasn’t enough to provide legit results. I added a few more tunes to A/B test in the real market to get the optimum solution.
4. Component Level
Improve and apply AfterShip UI Lib to moderate learning curve.
To lower the learning curve, UI components from AfterShip UI Lib was applied as much as possible.
The components were customized and applied to Returns Center. It shortened the development time to increase the feedback loops.
In the meanwhile, when working on Returns Center, I improved the design system and guidelines of AfterShip.
Gather feedbacks
Besides sketching by myself, I kept the design process transparent and learn from feedbacks.
I defined my own feedback gathering process to use different perspectives I need in the different stage. After that, I identify the valid opinions to perfect my design.
Retrospective
I found it hard to balance the design ambition and new features requests. The cadence of working in scrum team at such rapid pace for a product at this complexity is hard to control.
However, by having total ownership of the design, I’ve learned how to make use of resources and data to define, achieve and validate my design strategies, which in the end made an impact to not only the user experience but also the e-commerce industry.
