Breaking a key bottleneck in the shopping flow
As UX Manager, I led the redesign of Walgreens’ checkout, replacing a multi-page process with a streamlined one-click experience.
Challenge
Walgreens’ legacy checkout experience spanned multiple pages, required extensive scrolling, and repeated redundant information—creating friction and frustration. Mobile users were hit hardest, with abandonment rates exceeding 49%, translating into significant lost revenue.
Insights
My team worked with the analytics team to perform a fallout analysis, which revealed steep drop-offs at every step of the funnel, from account creation to payment.
Root causes included cognitive overload, time-consuming, unnecessary form fills, and unclear progress indicators.
Research confirmed that simplifying checkout could deliver an 18% lift in conversion.
Approach
My team leveraged a data-driven approach to diagnose critical failure points in the checkout process. Our research included analyzing hundreds of customer surveys that indicated high frustration with complexity, a competitive landscape analysis of key rivals and delivery partners, and targeted user research. This comprehensive review established that our platform was significantly under-performing against user expectations for ease of use, guiding the subsequent design strategy.
We led cross-functional workshops with product and business stakeholders to align on the “why” (reduce friction, boost conversion) and the “how” (prioritize clarity, minimize effort). Key principles emerged: Reduce cognitive load, streamline content hierarchy, enable faster task completion.
Solution
The team designed a one-click checkout that consolidated all essential actions into a single, streamlined view—eliminating unnecessary pages, reducing scrolling, and creating a truly mobile-first flow. We achieved this by being intentional about what information and decisions users actually needed to see. For example, instead of forcing every customer to review substitution preferences for each item, we analyzed catalog-wide out-of-stock patterns and surfaced this question only when an item had low inventory or high purchase velocity. This reduced cognitive load without sacrificing accuracy or customer control.
We also uncovered a major source of friction: returning customers with saved payment methods were repeatedly asked to enter their CVV due to outdated fraud-prevention rules. By modernizing those requirements—maintaining security without unnecessary prompts—we removed yet another step and eliminated a persistent pain point in the checkout experience.
