The goal of Amazon's redesign is to help customers recycle products they bought and maintain the profit of recycling at the same time. To provide a seamless recycling process, I decided to increase the usage of the current recycling program through the mobile app redesign.
Roles
UX Researcher, UX Designer
Team of 2
Tools
Design: miro, Figma
Research: Google forms survey, interview
Duration
September 2020
1-week design sprint challenge
Problem Space
Worldwide, we generate about 40 million tons of electronic waste every year, and that is like throwing away 800 laptops every second. Our group explored opportunities for the e-commerce industry to tackle sustainability by waste reduction while maintaining business profits for recycling programs.
I incorporated the gap between stakeholders and users and found some recycling programs had complex navigation processes for users to find. It resulted in online shoppers not acknowledge the existence of current recycling programs or choose not to use such services.
Secondary Research
Due to the time constraint of this design sprint, the secondary research methods were the best practice to quickly understand stakeholders.
To closely look at how different stakeholders tackle sustainability and recycling in the system, I identified their motivations and concerns via competitive analysis, user interviews, and surveys.
Competitive Analysis
While generating ideas for the solution, I researched a couple of existing apps, websites, and services that could be helpful. I categorized existing recycling programs to following:
1. Recycling program included in e-commerce website/app
2. Individual recycling apps/websites
User Research
I conducted 2 stakeholder and 2 user interviews as well as surveys to support our market research. The surveys were spread through Facebook, Slack, Instagram to collect data, and I ended up getting 20 responses within a day.
Interview and Survey Insights
Stakeholder: E-commerce Business
Through our stakeholder interview, we found out that some popular e-commerce businesses such as Amazon, Walmart, and other large e-commerce businesses all have their own recycling programs that provide cashback or gift cards when customers return old or broken devices.
Key pain points discovered:
Recycling programs may not help e-commerce businesses increase their revenues
Recycling programs & sustainable materials increase production cost, smaller businesses were not able to afford
High cost on marketing new services
User: Online Shopping Customers
Besides stakeholders, I asked online shopping users from different social media platforms to fill out a recycling survey. The survey showed that 70% of participants chose Amazon as their favorite shopping website.
Key pain points discovered:
Low discoverability of existing recycling programs
Low usage of existing recycling programs
High complication on navigating existing recycling programs
Contextual Inquiries
I observed users’ online shopping behavior by recording their shopping process from browsing to checkout.
Motivations and Concerns of Stakeholders to Utilize Recycling Services
Ideation
Considering the existing apps and services, we came up with ideas that could potentially be featured on our prototype. The following ideas will focus on app design since they are more aligned with our design challenge problem.
1. Redesign existing app interface—
since a whole lot of huge e-commerce websites/apps already have their own recycling programs, such as Apple, Amazon, Walmart,etc., we considered making the service more visible on the app interface
2. Create a new app to track locations that need recycling services —
this will be a new service that is only created to track wherever the recycling services are. There could be a courier to pick up the recycling items or users drop-off at selected locations
3. Add-on features to the existing app which already has a recycling program —
this allows the app to modify their current recycling program models, such as including a mapping function to display item drop-off location or second-hand store
Usability Test Insights
Design Recommendation/AB Testing
To improve our prototype, we ran usability tests to get insight from potential users and explore the future direction of our design intervention, the following are the changes we made:
Checkout Page
Changed the “yes” “no” button on the checkout page to green and added the recycling question as “(Optional)” to differentiate the priority between “place order”
Landing Page
Moved the “Earn gift card” feature to the most left on the top nav bar to increase the findability of the feature
Solutions and Design Features
As our user survey revealed that 70% of our participants chose Amazon as their favorite shopping site, we came up with a solution of Amazon app checkout screen redesign with revision of usability tests. The goal of our solution is to make more customers realize the existing recycling program as well as making the recycling process more convenient so more customers are willing to recycle. This process should also stimulate the shopping need.
The redesign mainly focused on two add-on features:
Increase the visibility of the Amazon Second Chance program on the Amazon app landing page by adding the link on top of the navigation bar and naming it “Earn gift card” to increase incentives to click on. The link to Amazon second chance is also added on the checkout screen to increase the accessibility of the current recycling program. By doing so, it presented how customers could benefit from the recycling program as well as the existence of the program.
2. Add an optional question asking if customers have any goods to recycle at the shopper’s checkout screen. If they do, the next time when their delivery/package arrives, the courier/postman will pick up the things they want to recycle. By doing so, customers receive store credit instead of cash, and the credits will return to Amazon eventually, thus, increase the revenue.
Reflection
As we went through our design process, we figured that there are some features that Amazon Second Chance offered but we didn’t focus on, which are donate, resell, repair features. We hope we could develop those on our add-on features on the checkout screen as well as develop the same checkout screen with add-on features on the website. From our usability tests, our users expressed interests in using the recycling features.
Furthermore, we hope that the concept of making existing recycling programs more visible could expand on more e-commerce websites and apps. In that case, users acknowledge the importance of recycling and make it a new shopping habit.