Amazon Style

Problem

Amazon Style was Amazon’s first-ever physical fashion store offering an innovative & personalized place to shop clothes, beauty, and more. A few months into our inaugural launch, we noticed customers would abandon the fitting room queue usually within the first 5 min of waiting, which was an indicator to us that something about seeing the wait time immediately after joining the queue was a turnoff and not worth the value of going to the fitting room. But with the way that our operations worked there had to be a wait because the customer flow was dependent on the operational flow of the associates. So the customer felt all the complexity of our operations without understanding why it was worth it.

What I did

Iterations | We iterated on the flow with both small and large changes - from focusing on that first 5 min experience when a customer joins a queue by changing how we messaged the wait, to auto-progressing past a step to remove a customer decision point. But all of these iterations resulted in no impactful change to customers abandoning their fitting room queue.

Trade off decision | Thus we had to make an even more drastic change. We completely simplified the customer flow by revealing the room number immediately after a customer adds their first item, so a customer has virtually no perceived wait anymore and can access their room whenever they decide to, which gives them more control in their journey. But a big tradeoff was that a customer could now walk into their room while the associate is still picking or delivering their items and enter an empty closet, which would risk a less impressive and more confusing fitting room experience. After presenting to leadership, we decided it was still worth experimenting because the hope was a customer would still choose to take the time to browse the showroom and enter their FR after their items arrive, or hope that if customers did beat their items to the room, they could browse the fitting room screen while waiting for their items which would provide a more personalized browsing experience and act as a positive distraction to reduce wait time perception.

Design solution | My design goals were to build up excitement in the room reveal moment to emphasize that the room was a big deal with an energizing but not distracting animation, and to relieve the customer burden of figuring out what to do next by informing them which items were delivered in real time.

Concept validation & launch | To validate this concept, we did a combination of qualitative testing at our lab which gave us enough confidence that the concept wasn’t worse than the current experience, and quantitative testing using an A/B test at our actual store location. We saw a +740bps improvement in FR abandonment putting us within our target range for the first time since launch! The overall results were successful and reveal room upfront became the new plan of record across both store locations!