Redesigning the wish list for johnlewis.com

The challenge

John Lewis was launching a new responsive website and had begun directing customers to it. Wish List was the last core feature that was missing, giving us an 8-week timeframe to design and implement a fully responsive, mobile-first Wish List before all customer traffic were using the new website.

The goal

Create a simplified, lovable and complete Wish List experience that supports the wants and needs of our Best Customers.

The process

The status quo

The ultimate goal was to achieve feature parity. The two main constraints that we had were time (we didn't have much) and technology (limited scope to change the backend). With that in mind we began by understanding how the current Wish List worked, from both a user experience and technology point of view.

User flows

One constraint we had was that we were unable to make changes to the backend functionality. I created a User Flow Diagram using OmniGraffle that visualised how the current Wish List worked so that the team had a shared understanding.

User wants and needs

We gathered insights from the data team and held focus groups to understand who the users were and what purpose the Wish List served.

We discovered early on that Wish List was used by a small percentage of users, however, they were predominantly our Best Customers. We also found out that although customers could create up to 5 Wish Lists, around 90% of those that used the feature only had a single Wish List. We discussed a concept of merging customers' Wish Lists into a single Wish List with the ability to 'tag' items, however, this felt like too much of a departure from the original goal.

Who?

• Best Customers
• Great Customers
• In-Store Partners

Why?

• Researching and shortlisting
• Shopping for me
• Shopping for someone else
• Gifting

When?

• Day to day
• Special occasions
• Seasonal
• Bargain hunting
• Gift list
• In-store services (e.g. Personal Styling)
• Out of stock items

Customer feedback

We gathered feedback that had been submitted by customers regarding Wish List and categorised the comments. 54% were about the disappearance of Wish List, 27% were feature ideas, 19% were defects/usability issues.

Feedback categories

Source: edigitalsurvey

Weekly goals

We set weekly goals to ensure we were making improvements to the user experience and continuously adding value. Because of the feedback we had received, we decided to add a navigation link and redirect customers back to the old Wish List using a strangulation method. This ensured those that wanted to use their Wish List at very least had access to it.

The second goal was to create a 'view only' Wish List. This meant customers that had already created and added items to a Wish List could now view the items and purchase them. However, many features such as 'stock' and 'Add to basket' were missing at this point (but customers could click through and find this information).

The third goal was to allow customers to start adding and removing items from their existing Wish Lists.

From then on we started implementing the remaining features including stock status, add to basket, create Wish List, rename Wish List and delete Wish Lists.

Design

The outcome

We launched the new responsive Wish List within 8 weeks and achieved the level of feature parity we set out to reach plus made some significant UX improvements, including significantly simplifying the experience for the ~90% of customers that have a single Wish List.

Of those customers using the new Wish List we saw a significant increase in the number of items they were adding to Wish Lists vs the old Wish List.

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