Making order confirmation pages better for users and business
Better experiences are better for business. With a brief to improve the commercial performance of EE's confirmation pages, we achieved this by improving the usability and visual design of the page.
Project goals
01
Re-engage users post purchase
Analytics data showed that the vast majority of users left the website post-purchase and that many users that would be eligible for upgrades or additional purchases don't engage with their offers.
02
Reduce customer support costs
A significant amount of calls were being driven by the existing confirmation page and were often regarding routine questions or concerns.
03
Update the visual feel to match the new brand
The confirmation page(s) were very outdated and used old components. We also wanted to include moments of delight where possible to make the user excited about their new purchase.
Challenges
01
Balancing functionality with commercial asks
EE's existing confirmation pages had very little commerical messaging on them and initial user research showed that confirmation pages serve an important functional role for users wanting to review their order.
02
Limited backend engineering resource
For this project we unfortuantely didn't have an available backend developer. This meant that we had to use only front-end changes to repackage the data that was already on the confirmation page and couldn't fetch other data.
03
Consolidating lots of content
There was a lot of information about the user's order and commercial messages that had to be included in an easily consumable way.
Confirmation screens vs emails
User research showed that users see order confirmation as essential proof of purchase while order confirmation screens (what you see once you’ve placed an order on a website or app) are seen as less important and more appropriate to advertise on.
Testing the existing pages validated that most of the most content was either of secondary importance or unnecessary and therefore didn’t have to be visible by default.
Initial ideas focussed on simplicity and scannability. We also thought about animation and giving the user a sense of excitement.
Our key hypothesis was that condensing all secondary information into accordions would improve usability and allow commercial content to be surfaced without annoying customers - which we were able to validate in user testing. We also discovered improvement opportunities, some as simple as adding a single word.
The final designs balance moments of delight with practical improvements to the page's information architecture and visual hierarchy.
A key lesson learned was to test key hypotheses early on, even if the idea is still very rough. This applies especially to technical possibilities, such as tech stacks or backend structure, and design concepts.
