Simplifying the path to purchase through iterative design.
Challenge
Sears' online checkout experience required shoppers to navigate more than 12 pages to complete a purchase.
Customer feedback consistently identified the checkout process as too long, creating unnecessary friction at one of the most critical points in the shopping journey.
The UX team set out to transform the experience into a streamlined, single-page checkout. My role was to evaluate iterative designs throughout development, identify usability barriers, and help ensure the new experience remained understandable as complex purchasing and fulfillment options were introduced.
Note: Due to confidentiality, the image above is not the design used in this study. I created this example to illustrate the concept of a single-page checkout.
Approach
I conducted four rounds of unmoderated usability testing with 26 participants as the checkout experience evolved from an early static design to increasingly interactive prototypes.
Rather than evaluating the experience only once, each round built on findings from the previous study. This allowed the team to identify usability issues, refine the design, and validate changes throughout development.
Testing also included increasingly complex purchase and fulfillment scenarios—including shipping, store pickup, delivery, and installation—to understand whether the single-page experience remained clear as additional options were introduced.
Insights & Impact
Iterations introduced unexpected friction
As the checkout design evolved, later rounds of testing revealed usability issues in areas that had performed well in earlier studies. Changes intended to improve the experience were inadvertently introducing new points of friction.
Comparing findings across rounds helped identify where new design decisions—not the original experience—were contributing to usability problems.
Research helped refocus the design
Findings across the four studies gave the team a clear record of which elements had consistently worked and where users had encountered difficulty. After the fourth round, the team revisited the original design and incorporated recommendations from earlier research rather than continuing to modify elements that had already tested successfully.
Impact: From 12+ pages to 1
Following final usability validation, the redesigned checkout was launched as a single-page experience—transforming a purchasing process that previously required customers to navigate more than 12 pages to just one.
After launch, the quantitative team reviewed behavioral data to confirm that customers were successfully completing purchases through the new experience. Customer feedback also described the redesigned checkout as quicker, easier, and more user-friendly.