Envu
Navigating Technical Constraints to Design a Custom Checkout Experience
I designed a streamlined, user-friendly checkout flow for ordering client-specific rewards that couldn't be offered through the normal catalog. Unforeseen technical limitations forced a nearly total redesign of the feature after development had started, but the feature still launched on time and generated increased engagement.
My Involvement
- Sales/RFP Response
- Discovery
- Product Strategy
- Experience Design & Prototyping
- Copywriting
- QA/Usability Testing
Timeline & Team
The initial phase lasted 12 weeks. I was the sole UX resource on an 8-person, fully-remote team consisting of 4 practice leads, the Account Director, Operations Specialist, Business Analyst, and Scrum Master.
Results
- On-time launch, despite technical challenges and accelerated timeline.
- Record volume of points were redeemed via the new feature in the first 6 weeks after launch.
$9.7M
total value of points available to participants when the new system launched
$4M
value of client-specific rewards redeemed in the first 6 weeks
80%
of all points redeemed in the first 6 weeks were spent via the new checkout feature
47%
YoY reduction in expiring points (attributed to increased engagement)
BACKGROUND
Envu is a global leader in agricultural pest and disease management. Their My Envu Rewards program pays over $5 million USD in incentives annually to more than 14,000 participants. One10 had recently won Envu’s incentive business from another vendor.
As Senior UX Architect, I led the UX on the team that was migrating Envu’s complex program onto PerformX, One10’s sales incentive management platform. Like most loyalty programs, the primary mechanic in PerformX is a system that awards points for achieving specific goals and activities. Those points can then be redeemed for merchandise in an online catalog.
Envu offered some reward options that couldn’t be fulfilled through the platform's standard merchandise catalog, so we needed to design a way for participants to order these Envu-specific rewards.
Expectations were high because the ordering process in their previous system was confusing to many users, often leading to orders that required manual intervention to be processed.
OBJECTIVES
Extend the platform's redemption and checkout capabilities. Providing a way to order Envu-specific rewards was one of our top priorities.
Eliminate pain points. Delivering a streamlined, user-friendly solution was essential to making good on PerformX's value proposition to this new client.
TIMELINE
🗓️
4 months
The team had 4 months to get the full program site running on PerformX in time for the start of Envu’s fall sales season, which generated the vast majority of their annual sales volume.
😅
Actually… make that 3 months
For a subset of features, the deadline was moved up by a month so the client could show off the new system at a trade show. This left us with only 12 weeks to design, develop, and test the redemption feature.
😱
Murphy's Law
After development began, it was discovered that tech-debt made some of the new design's key functionality impossible without significantly more dev hours than budgeted. While resolving this debt was necessary for the long-term product strategy, it jeopardized our ability to meet the near-term deadlines.
PROCESS
🔬
Discovery
Working closely with the BA and Operations Specialist, I gained a thorough understanding of the client’s requirements and business processes.
🎨
Design & Prototype
With daily feedback from the BA and Ops, I iterated on the user flows until we had a streamlined experience. Then built a hi-fidelity prototype to demonstrate the end-to-end UX.
♟️
Strategize & Pivot
Unforeseen tech-debt put the project timeline and budget at risk.
Working with developers to understand the new problem space, I proposed an interim design that could be upgraded later with minimal effort.
👍
Review Final Builds
I worked with the QA and FE teams to help ensure overall UI quality, providing final sign-off on design accuracy and usability.
DISCOVERY
User Research and Interviews Revealed Pain Points in the Existing Credit and Rebate Order Process
I met remotely with our Client Operations Specialist, who had several years of experience working with the client’s program. She was responsible for processing the redemption orders and for responding to support requests from users.
Through interviewing her, observing her workflow, and studying emails received by the help desk, I identified pain points in the previous ordering system—for both the end users and the Ops team.
Chief among these was the high rate of Credit and Rebate orders that needed manual intervention to correct errors on the order forms. Not only was this extremely frustrating for the participants, it was very time-consuming and expensive for the client.
It appeared that many of the errors resulted from people misunderstanding the requirements and policies of the program:
- Confusing content — inconsistent terminology made some expectations unclear. One form even collected information that wasn’t needed to process the order!
- Layout and styling — form fields weren’t arranged logically; text styling made some parts confusing to read.
- System messaging and feedback — order forms could be submitted with missing or invalid information, causing delays and confusion.
- Instructional text — important requirements were buried in lengthy instructional emails that most users skipped.
"They get these [long instructional] emails and half of them don’t read them, and then they email me asking how to redeem their points."
from an interview with the Program Operations Specialist
DESIGN & PROTOTYPING
A Custom Feature from a Product Perspective
As the UX lead, part of my responsibility is to promote a product-perspective in the design of any new features.
The initial estimate of this feature, written prior to my involvement, envisioned it as a custom product extension, built as a one-off for this client. The approach essentially recreated the legacy forms within PerformX, in a way that would have created a user flow completely separate from the product's existing redemption and checkout experience.
This approach left me uncomfortable because it didn't address the usability and operational problems inherent to the legacy process, and it would have introduced unnecessary patterns and complexity to our product experience.
I theorized that redesigning the checkout process in alignment with our product standards would naturally alleviate the major pain points.
- Simplified Forms: Bring consistency and brevity to the microcopy and remove unnecessary inputs.
- Contextual Guidance: Replace lengthy documentation with more granular, strategically placed instructional text.
- Messaging & System Feedback: Enhance real-time validation and error messages to help prevent invalid or incomplete submissions.
I also had my eye on the potential business and strategic advantages of a redesign.
- Reduced Dev and QA hours: Leveraging existing UI patterns would make it less expensive to build and test
- Scalability: Even more non-merchandise reward types were on the product roadmap. If we were strategic about the Envu design, it could establish an extensible checkout pattern that would be useful for other clients.
With daily feedback from the BA and Operations, I iterated on the user flows until we had a streamlined experience.
Then, working with our Design System component library I built hi-fidelity interactive prototypes to demonstrate the end-to-end user experience and interaction design.
My design seamlessly integrated the new functionality with the existing UI, maintaining a coherent checkout experience for all redemption types.
Since this approach used established UI patterns, it would also be quicker and cheaper to build.
STRATEGIZE & PIVOT
Negotiating a New Approach to Minimize Risk Amid Unforeseen Technical Challenges
When development started, we discovered that some of the front-end code needed to support the functionality of the new design wasn’t in place yet. This tech-debt was known to the Product team, but it wasn't in their plan for the current sprint. We needed to determine a way forward that could still deliver the feature on time.
Our delivery team was faced with a choice between waiting several months for the Product team to deliver the updated code, updating the code ourselves, or redesigning the redemption feature to work with the existing codebase.
- Waiting for the updates would have delayed the feature, which was not an option.
- Taking on the dev work was an appealing long-term strategy because it would have accelerated the product updates and avoided re-work in the future, but in the near-term the additional scope would have stretched resources on the delivery team and put other deliverables at risk.
- Redesigning meant more effort overall (extra design now, plus an extra round of dev and QA in the future when the original design could finally be implemented), but it posed the least risk to the initial launch.
I met with devs, tested and explored the capabilities of the existing framework in a QA environment, and estimated LoE and UX hours so the team could compare the costs associated with different design approaches. I also partnered with internal stakeholders to negotiate the scope of the feature and prioritize work that would de-risk the interim solutions.
The decision was made to pivot to a new design that could function within the current limitations.
This meant compromising on some product standards in the near-term, so I set out to devise a strategic design approach that would maximize the benefits of this effort by:
- still relieving as many pain points as possible
- working around some of the usability problems inherent to the current framework
- minimizing future re-work by keeping the interim design as close as possible to the future state
OUTCOMES
My Envu Rewards launched on-schedule, hitting the accelerated deadline.
The new checkout interface fulfilled a record volume of point redemptions in the first month after launch.
- $5M worth of points were redeemed in the first six weeks after launch
- $4M of those were spent via the newly designed redemption feature
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