Seamless Ecommerce Integration: Allstate Protection at Homemakers Furniture
Homemakers is Iowa’s largest furniture retailer with the lowest prices and largest selection of furniture, mattresses and accessories. After Homemakers pivoted away from Guardsman Furniture Protection suddenly and moved towards Allstate, they needed a way to integrate Allstate quickly and effectively without much disruption. Allstate Protection is a trusted provider of protection plans throughout the furniture industry integrated with companies such as Target, NFM, Wayfair and other direct competitors to Homemakers Furniture.
Company
Homemakers Furniture
Role
UX Designer
Employment
Full-time
Period
5 Months
Key Focus Areas
UX Design, UI Design, Visual Design, Developer Hand-Off, AB Testing, Frontend Web Development (HTML/CSS)
Problem Statement
After Homemakers discontinued its partnership with Guardsman Furniture Protection, a new approach was needed to help support the impending Allstate Protection Plan implementation in a way that enhances customer experience, trust and drives business growth for both Homemakers and Allstate.
How Might We
How might we seamlessly integrate Allstate Protection Plans into the Homemakers ecommerce experience while ensuring a frictionless user journey and maximizing revenue potential for both Allstate and Homemakers?
Discovery & Strategy
Research & Understanding
Allstate requires interstitial pop-ups for every add to cart, but I knew this would become a primary friction/pain point for the average shopper. This is one of the many challenges that I would need to face when designing a solution. We conducted a competitive analysis on how other leading retailers integrated their Allstate Protection Plans such as Target, NFM and Wayfair. In my findings from our competitors, I found many pain points on NFM that would contribute to cognitive load. I also performed a heuristic evaluation of the current protection plan process from Homemakers’ previous protection plan partner, Guardsman Furniture Protection which involved diving into current user flows to improve the overall experience for the Allstate implementation.
Business Opportunities
- Switch to a very well-known and reputable protection plan service to increase trustworthiness in our customers
- Improve upon the user experience from the older Guardsman experience
- Reduce customer service inquiries related to protection plans
Define
Goals & Objectives
- Provide clear value propositions for protection plans within the ecommerce experience
- Reduce friction in the user’s journey to maintain or improve conversion rates
- Increase in protection plan purchases by switching to Allstate
- Reduced friction in the customer journeys
- Make protection plans easily discoverable without disrupting the purchase process as much as possible
- Provide and clearly communicate value propositions with the customer
User Needs
- Users need clarity on the value of a protection plan
- Users should be able to add a protection plan without feeling forced
Target Competitor Analysis
- Strengths
- Product pages clearly indicate that they have a protection plan available
- Weaknesses
- Minicart is cluttered with too much information at times
Nebraska Furniture Mart Competitor Analysis
- Strengths
- Detailed plan descriptions on their protection plan landing pages, attempting to answer any questions a customer may have before redirecting to customer service
- Weaknesses
- Interstitial pop-ups were complex and overcomplicating, difficult to process in very short amount of time
- No information shown on their PDPs
Wayfair Competitor Analysis
- Strengths
- Simple and straight-forward approach using line item by line item implementation of the protection plans
- Well-designed interstitial pop-ups including value propositions before adding a plan
- Product pages clearly indicate the plan
Allstate’s Best Practices & Recommendations
- Interstitial pop-up for product pages when user clicks add to cart, recommended after each add to cart
- Keep the pop-up short and simple, recommended to add value proposition
- Learn more links for users to learn about Allstate Protection and the benefits
Ideate
Design Decision #1
To kick off my design process, Homemakers IT and myself had two very different backend approaches to think about and make a choice on one approach in order to continue forward. Whichever option was chosen at this point was the direction I followed for my designs. Ultimately, our stakeholders and myself opted for option 2 as it benefitted the customer having to pay less for their total protection by having more items in their cart.
- Option 1
Adding the protection plan line item by line item which was simplest in terms of presenting plans and prices on the frontend. This meant every item had a single price associated with it depending on which warranty category it was under. - Option 2
Adding the protection plan line item by line item, except aggregating all like products together based on a pricing table. A little more complex, but doable. This meant two like items would be aggregated together and the item with the highest price tier would be the price of the plan for both items.
Design Decision #2
Allstate recommended an interstitial pop-up on every add to cart. I disagreed with this approach as it would create too much friction and disruption for our users seeing a pop-up for every add to cart which would result in a decrease of revenue and conversion. We can prevent a customer from getting frustrated by limiting the amount of pop-ups they receive when adding products to their cart. After adding two products to cart and choosing to decline protection on their added products, they will not receive anymore pop-ups throughout their journey. Two was picked based on average item add to cart per user. However, the user would still have the opportunity one last time during checkout to add protection on their purchase. This is where AB testing becomes important later on because I will want to experiment different designs and flows to continue to refine this even after go live.
Design & Implementation
Finalized Design Mockups for PDPs, Pop-ups & Cart Page
Finalized Design Mockups for Branded Landing Page
Test
Test Opportunities After Launch
- Optimizing the User Flow
By optimizing the user flow, we can prevent a customer from getting frustrated by limiting the amount of plan pop-ups they receive when adding products to their cart. After adding two products to cart and declining protection on their products, they will not receive anymore pop-ups throughout their journey. However, they will still have the option to manually check a box during checkout to cover all their products for an grouped price based on the products in their cart.
Results & Impact
Overall Results and Impact
This program hasn’t been implemented on the website yet, but is actively being developed in the backend and being used in-store. Again to reiterate for our approach for the website, we are aiming to increase conversions for both products and protection plans while increasing trust of protection with well-known Allstate Protection Plans. This page will be updated again when it launches and I start receiving data.