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OVERVIEW

Aritzia is a Canadian major women's fashion retailer with stores across Canada, the US and Internationally. Historically, Aritzia has only offered returns by providing a physical label within the customers' original order. This is an inconvenient experience given that it places a lot of responsibility on the customer to keep their physical return label. 

• The Returns Process begins when the customer initiates the return. If a customer does not create a return, or rather if the product does not match the return label, it results in a 'missing' or 'invalid' return ID
• In FY20: 58,100 packages (47% of total returns) were returned to the DC (distribution center) with a missing or invalid return ID.
• In cases where a Merchandise Credit is issued, Aritzia Concierge manually sends the E-Gift Card Email to each individual customer.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

We started by doing an audit on the Returns experience of our major competitors and other big players within the E-Commerce space: Amazon, Lululemon and Reformation + more.

USER INTERVIEWS

We held x5 user interviews with Aritzia customers and asked for them to go through the Returns experience on a few of our competitors websites from the Entry Point, Item Selection, Request and Confirmation screens. We then took that feedback and placed a score for each site based on our Guiding Principles. 

• Customers appreciated having a dedicated landing page for returns that was easy to 
         access from multiple points: navigation, footer, etc. 
• Customers need clear steps outlined in the returns process to feel like it will be a
         hassle-free experience.
• Amazon came out on top in terms of overall functionality and usability, but was
         definitely not MVP of aesthetics.

CURRENT EXPERIENCE AUDIT

We also performed an audit of the current experience and interviewed x5 Artizia customers again in a similar format to the competitive analysis to get their feedback on the Aritzia returns experience.  We then highlighted the largest areas of opportunity based on our Guiding Principles on the following areas: Entry Point, Returns Flow, and Order Details.

Given the large scope of the project, we decided to just focus on the Returns Flow itself and tackle the Entry Point and changes to Order Details in the future. 

TEAM WORKSHOP

With the learnings from our competitive analysis and current experience audit,  we ran a workshop with the team to help brainstorm other possible design solutions.

We landed on a fairly minimal UI, showcasing the steps of the return process initially through numbers located at the top of the screen. We ensured the language used at each step was simple and communicated what the customer needed to do clearly. 

We explored allowing customers to provide feedback as a means to collect data on general sentiment of our returns process, so to make any optimizations in the future. 

We included product recommendations to encourage customers to find other items of interest in lieu of the return.

USER INTERVIEWS

We interviewed another x5 Aritzia customers to get their feedback and thoughts around this exploration of the revamped returns experience. 

LEARNINGS

• Customers were confused by the UI treatment of the steps as 1/4, 2/4, etc., some feeling like they weren't sure if that was number of items they were returning or not 
• Customers also preferred seeing all of their items on one screen when choosing the reason for the return, stating that doing them one at a time felt like a longer experience.
• Customers did not seem to care for rating the return experience unless they were incentivized to do so e.g. Get 10% off your next order by telling us how we did 
• Customers also did not seem to care for the product recommendations, stating that it feels too aggressive to suggest products right after submitting the return.

V1 LAUNCH

Based on customer feedback around the confusion of the steps as we decided to utilize existing step-by-step elements and borrowed UI elements from our checkout experience. This took into account the standard steps that are included in almost every return process (item selection, reason for return, return method and confirmation), so we iterated on specifically calling out what each step was. 

We changed the item selection screen to use checkboxes instead of radio buttons to better indicate that it was possible to select multiple items, or all items. 

We moved to having all items shown when selecting a reason for return. There were initial concerns that customers with a lot of items to return would have a hard time scrolling and selecting. However according to our data, our customers on average return 2-3 items at a time, so this felt more like an edge case. 

We decided to remove the rating system as well as product recommendations and instead planned for future explorations of both. These felt more like nice-to-haves for v1 launch. 

KEY METRICS

We implemented tracking on each step to measure drop-off rates and future-planned to include some sort of survey or ability to rate. 

This project launched post my departure, so I do not have the specific numbers. However, sentiment from quick testing with customers on the final iteration was positively received.

This initiative was estimated to save ~$500,000 annually on customer service/labor costs.