The Ken's checkout suffered from usability pitfalls while simultaneously not reflecting the company's goals. My team and I overhauled the entire flow.
timeline
2 Weeks
Team
Aakash Rodrigues, Cyril Stephen, Harshita Jalan
my role
Ideation, Wireframing, UI Design, Interactive Prototyping
problem
What Was The Problem?
For readers of The Ken, the checkout presented usability issues - efficiency in particular.=
For the business, the checkout lacked a recurring subscription option, limiting long-term subscription growth.
Additionally, not reflecting the company’s rebranding while purchasing the subscription risked distrust among readers.
goals
project goals
Establish recurring payments
Despite strong retention, The Ken had no option for recurring payments
01.
Improve checkout efficiency
Repetitive actions, inefficient inputs, and unclear UI led to unwarranted friction
02.
Update UI to reflect the new re-branding
The new app and part of the website had a different brand identity
03.
design process
How we arrived to the solution
UX Audit
insights from auditing the existing checkout flow
Repetitive steps
Users were asked to confirm their subscription although they had just selected it prior to checkout.
01.
Inefficient and confusing input methods
Lacking dropdowns, the UI forced users to enter country/state names manually and didn’t prompt for a phone country code
02.
Unnecessary steps
The user had to mandatorily confirm 1) their email when signed in, and 2) payment amount when it had already been shown twice earlier
03.
Abrupt UI change
Loading the payment processor causes an abrupt page change, risking trust and confusion
04.
iterative design
Exploring solutions
Solution 1
One-step checkout
Communicating subscription duration and renewal info
Visuals were distracting
Recurring subscription is the default - the user does not have control over it
Technical feasibility to implement "Avail GST Credit" as designed
solution 2
Traditional, safe two-column for checkout
Breaking down the flow into steps
Re-affirming user's decision to buy the subscription
Carousel format was distracting
Subscriber card - Would the user even understand what the card is?
Solution 3
One-step checkout
Presents just the bare minimum information to achieve the goal of checking out
Layout is extremely focused
Building user trust - Was this really effective at this stage?
Subscriber card taking away the attention from the checkout steps
converge
We decided to move forward with Solution 3
Why?
One-step checkout
Clearly surfaces recurring subscription details
The one-column layout felt very focused on the task at hand
solution
Final Design Solution
Reflection
"You Don't Design in silo" — Personal lesson on embracing cross-functional feedback
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