From "Good Enough" to "State of the Art"
Baymard Institute gave JCPenney the rating of "State of the Art" around shipping & store pickup
**The following work was done in 2016 as part of JCPenney’s introduction of Buy Online Pickup In Store (BOPIS). Although we updated the UI throughout the years, the solutions is still in place today.
The Situation
You're shopping online at a nearby omni-channel retailer — one with several locations across your metro area. You need a few things for an upcoming event and want to buy online, then pick up same-day. Cart full, you head to checkout.
The Problem
As you review your cart and select a pickup location, you notice that not all of your items are available at your preferred store. Now you're left with a key question: which nearby location has everything — or at least most of what you need?
Iterations & Failures
Wireframes
01 > Fail
The initial iteration was great for showing a location where all your items were available, but if only some items in your cart were available at a given store the user did not have visibility to which items were or were not available.
02 > Fail
The 2nd iteration was better, but it still required the customer to select each store in order to see what items were or were not available. Too much work!
03 > Good Enough
I say better since it tested very well from a functional perspective, but I was not in love with the UI. This iteration allowed the customer to get a wholistic view of their shopping cart and how that would be impacted at each location. We did update the UI over the years.
Key Takeaways
Progress over perfection
I have to admit that back in 2016 this was probably the toughest challenge I had been faced with. In true designer fashion I was not satisfied with the solution and wanted to start over, but we had to ship it.
UI solution to a technical problem
If I'm being completely honest I'm surprised it's still being done the same way today. I never thought it was that great and maybe it's not. Until the backend system changes that allow pickup from multiple locations in one order it may never change. I am never a fan of applying UI solutions to technical problems, but often times that's what's required.