Revamping the old Sam's Club checkout flow

I worked with a UX designer, UX researcher, a product owner, project manager, and many developers. The initial research and wireframes were made by the UX researcher and the UX designer, once a structure was stablished, I designed more features along with hi-fidelity mockups.
Working with the Agile methodology devs were able to develop my designs while I was designing more things for them to work in the next sprint.

Several pain points were adding up and causing a high abandonment rate, including a lengthy process without a perceptible end. There was confusion between the order review and order confirmation pages, and too much scrolling required to see all products in the cart, or the subtotal.

One biggest issues we found was that users needed to complete all 7 fields in order to enter their shipping address information every time! Which is very annoying and time consuming.

Initially, we thought on creating an address book so users could save many addresses, but this would increasing the scope substantially. So our next idea was to re-utilize some of the functionality we already had. The “Account Information” page, gave users the chance to save their personal address, but surprisingly, the stored addresses were not been used for anything at all, they had no purpose or value for the business.

Maybe we could pull those stored addresses to help returning users.

The next problem we faced was that very few users had ever visit their account page, let alone saved their addresses. At least, now we had to space for storage, but how can we get users to save them? Our initial solution was to let them enter it as usual in the checkout, but giving them the option to save it as their "account" address, that way it would be prompted for future orders.

We also gave users the chance to edit their account address from within the checkout, as well as to use a complete different address if they wanted.

Even if the address was not saved as the account address, it could help users to see their previously used address. And If the previously used address is the same account address, the system will show it only as “Account Address”.

The address suggestion feature was growing in complexity and it was becoming harder for devs and managers to have a complete view of all the functionality just by using the clickable prototype.

So I thought it was a good idea to share the diagrams and maps I had been created. This way everyone was clear on what was expected from the experience and ended up helping devs to estimate their work better.

System behaviour and validation rules were defined so the user could finally get the right address.

Previous to this project, I worked on other pages of the site. Initially I defined basic styling elements like colours and fonts, and gradually started to expand it, creating basic components like buttons and form elements.
The fact that I had to work in other parts of the site made me have a good understanding of its needs, which helped to design UI components that could be reusable across the whole site.

One of the biggest problems I faced was that we committed to follow the main Sam’s Club site UI guidelines. I started to realize it’d be impossible for us to do exactly as they said, mainly because their guidelines were made for the main Sam’s Club site and not for third party sites like ours.
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After conversations with the client, we agreed on using some of their style guide and on creating our own components, trying to follow as much as possible the ones they have created already.

I always thought the whole experience needed to be fully fleshed out before starting development, but splitting the work per iterations made the whole project measurable and flexible to adjust to any unexpected difficulties.
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Many decisions/assumptions were made because of time constrains and not much time was dedicated to validate them. I think it would had been good to have to guidance from data analytics that could tell what to focus on within the short time available.
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Many times, when I had a question the answer was “don’t worry about it now” or “is not part of the scope”. It is obvious not everything can be done, but the fact I didn’t worry about somethings "out of scope" ended up on me readjusting things months later. As I said before, is not about planning the whole experience covering every scenario right away, it is about keeping in mind as a principle that things tend to grow, and they are expected to do so. Be smart and plan ahead.