Talk Companion | Keep Calm and Proceed to Checkout by Emma Craig
Presented on March 3, 2018 at UXRConf 2018 in Toronto, Canada.
Watch the full talk on YouTube here. Want to listen audio-only? Find this talk on Apple Podcasts here and Spotify here.
Talk Overview ✨
In this talk, Emma Craig shares her journey as a UX Researcher at Shopify, focusing on the importance of creating mindful and user-centric checkout experiences.
She discusses how user research can reveal deeper insights into user behavior and motivations, beyond just optimizing for speed and personalization.
Emma emphasizes the need to consider users’ well-being and values, advocating for a design approach that allows for reflection and thoughtful interaction. She shares practical research methods and frameworks to help teams build more inclusive and empathetic products that align with users’ true needs and goals.
Key Takeaways 🔑
Research Foundations: Start with foundational research to understand users’ needs and challenges before moving to evaluative studies.
Mindfulness Over Speed: UX work for checkout processes should consider the user’s mental state, providing a space for reflection, rather than speedy transactions.
Emotional Impact: Include research into the emotional state at different points of the user experience.
Continuous Adaptation: Always be looking for ways to refine your research objectives beyond some of the more obvious targets.
Transcript, Per ChatGPT 🤖
Hey, thank you for choosing me.
Alright. So we're all back from lunch, and I'm sure that over lunch, hopefully, you met some new UX researchers. I think there's about, like, 50% here we learned earlier. And you probably asked them as Alec had asked Ariel, how did you get here?
And I bet one of the most uncommon answers is I knew I was going to be a UX researcher from day 1. I went to school for it. It's been my dream since I was a child. I made my parents proud since 6th grade knowing I was going here. I think we all kind of stumbled into it.
We have some shared qualities like empathy, curiosity, but a lot of us just kind of wound up here. So I'm going to start off my talk, and bring us all back from lunch by telling you my own origin story since I didn't get the chance to meet many of you yet. Good news is it includes 3 photos I swore no one would ever see of me, and we've got this huge screen up. All right. So before any Avril Lavigne conspiracy theories start, this is me in junior high.
At which point I knew I was going to manage bands for a living. I wanted to be on the road with rock stars, scheduling tours, interviews, living that life. So of course, when it came time to go to university, I moved to Montreal, musical hub, one might say of Canada and Toronto. And, I went to Commerce School, which is not what you do if you wanna babysit bands for a living. But I think my parents were like, yep.
That makes sense. Go to business school. So I do 4 years of business school, and I start to realize that I'm probably gonna have to wear a lot of suits. Someone's going to tell me to cut my hair. And I didn't really love business, commerce.
So I pivoted completely. I became a yoga instructor, and I told my parents that I was going to move to the Okanagan and pick cherries and teach yoga and meditation. And they're like, fuck. Okay. But that's not what happened.
I work at Shopify, a commerce company, believe it or not, which that little Emma would have laughed at you if you told her. And I've been there for 5 years now. So my question to myself would be, why? And this is part of the reason. This is a small slice of our UX research team, but I still use this photo because I've never looked so happy in my entire life.
But I have many, many other reasons. When I started at Shopify, there were 60,000 merchants. I could have maybe 60,000 reasons at that point. And now with over 500,000 merchants on our platform, you could say I have half a 1000000 reasons to be doing what I do. And the Shopify platform, if you don't know of it, is a software.
We also have hardware for people who want to sell anything, either online, in person, using their phone to anywhere in the world, which means that we create a space where they can really set out to achieve their goals. But what I've noticed in the past 5 years is that many of these entrepreneurs that start at Shopify don't actually know what those goals are yet. What they do have is a vision or an idea of how they see themselves living. They have a lifestyle in mind. They have values that they're trying to accomplish.
And what's really special is we have the opportunity to give them that space to express themselves, to maybe go out and set some of those values for themselves and express that lifestyle that they see for themselves. I changed it up one more time. As Alec mentioned, I'm here from Montreal, and I moved to Montreal last year. I traded that half million for 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 because in Montreal, we have our checkout team. And the checkout is one of the few products at Shopify that isn't merchant facing.
It's the people that buy off of our merchants that are interacting with it. So I moved to Montreal not only because I think it's one of the best cities in Canada, but that little Emma with her really long hair that hasn't been brushed or cut in 4 years, that's falling asleep beneath Adbusters Buy Nothing posters, was kind of tugging on my shirt tails. Because I was working at a commerce company, but I still believe that there's something fundamentally wrong with how we treat people in commerce. How we take care of the people that are shopping. And if I'm encouraging entrepreneurs, if I'm empowering them, then I'm also enabling buying and buying behavior.
And right now I think there's something fundamentally wrong with that experience. So 68% of consumer decisions are made at the point of purchase. That just means that about 70% of purchases are those impulse buys. And impulse purchases, as many of us might know, activate those feel good chemicals in your brain. So as many of us also might know, when those chemicals are activated, it can become a little addicting.
It's the conversation that we're having a lot with the time well spent movement. Looking at our social media feeds, and how Facebook, Instagram are becoming addicting to people. And it doesn't mean that these products are inherently bad. It doesn't mean that shopping is bad, but the problem that I see with them is that it's really easy to shift the blame to the user to be addicted. We say, okay.
These millennials with their phones, these young kids that can't look up from Instagram, like, they're they're the ones with the with the addiction. But it's the people building these experiences that are building them to be addictive. The simple truth is that the responsibility is on us if we wanna see this space improve and if we wanna start taking care of the well-being of the people using our products. It's our duty to optimize these experiences so that we put the values of the user and their well-being at the forefront. If we could provide buyers with a space that they can express themselves, that they can maybe, you know, act out their values, like I try so hard to do with merchants, not just a feel to enter a credit card, then maybe I could do something good there too.
So what's interesting about the checkout in Shopify is that it's the only page that the code is locked. So every other page in Shopify, the merchant has complete control to change the design, make it look how they want. But for a slew of security privacy reasons, we set this code, we set the design, and this is how it looks. Which means that every single person processing a checkout on Shopify is going through this page here, which is what I'm researching. And to give you some context, right now we average about a 1000000 checkouts a day.
So that's thousands of checkouts every second going through this. Merchants can also allow their shoppers to check out in other places, like on the product page here, going straight to PayPal, Or perhaps on the shopping cart, they can skip the checkout button and choose to use Apple Pay or PayPal, another button. But what's important to keep in mind is that these are all isolated experiences. This is somebody sitting down at a computer, presumably, just wanting to buy the thing and going through these steps. When in reality, there's checkouts all around us.
We have checkouts on our Instagram feeds. We're in this peripheral technology sort of state, and we have a lot of checkouts around everyone. We have a lot of devices around everyone that we can't start to assume that we have someone's single attention. Well, we've previously been really accustomed to too many humans to a checkout, and I don't know if anyone saw me at lunch, like, trying to find the right lunch line. We're usually used to this case, but now we're operating in an environment where there's actually too many checkouts to humans.
This is rare to just be at the perfect little checkout window buying your one thing. They're happening all around us, which means that our attention is no longer on that single experience or that single checkout. So we need to update our design. Okay. So don't worry.
I know that many of us aren't researchers. I know that probably the majority of us are not going to work on a checkout, and my talk isn't about optimizing checkouts or just making a checkout comp. I think that most of us are probably designing products or experiences that are facing that dilemma of a ratio of devices to humans that's currently becoming a little unbalanced. We're all trying to find a way to use our attention and get our users' attention on our products, and we have to start considering how we're doing that and making sure that it is supporting their well-being. So to go about researching such a space with mindfulness in mind, I start with my 2 general questions, which are, okay, how does this thing work and behave, and how are people behaving and working with this thing as it's behaving?
So my third point is how to make a checkout calm. So you build a research roadmap. This is built with Roadmunk. It is subject to change. It has probably changed since I sent Maggie my slides last week.
And what I'd like to draw your attention to here though is that knowing that I had my own concerns about how checkouts currently were and how they were currently behaving, I started out with really foundational research. I wanted to build an idea of the buyer's needs and the buyer's challenges and align my team around that before I started getting into any evaluative research, Any quantitative studies, really. It's like how Sam said earlier that without that deep understanding of a problem space, without your insights through that qualitative ethnography, your AB testing, which you can see is literally at the very end, isn't going to be able to tell you very much. Our data isn't modeled yet for checkout to do the test that I want because I'm focusing on other stuff right now. Did some secondary research, which is my favorite.
I just get to read for a week. And 2 things stood out to me. Right now in the industry, we're working really hard to accelerate checkouts. Cool acceleration GIF. Make them go quicker, and that's like your Apple Pay, your Touch2Pay, your, like, cough near Amazon, and it'll show up next week.
And people are trying to make them more personalized as well. It was a thing of my Lululemon screen, which I'm on a lot. It's like, hello Emma. Tell us more about the Lululemon products that you like so that the next time you log in, you see all the wonder unders first. That's where we're headed.
So I got that. And then my next step was to listen. So, like, fundamental principle of mindfulness meditation, listen to what's around you. And with Shopify, we're really lucky because we have a huge user base. So we have a lot of existing support tickets, forum posts, inbound requests for things.
But we also have this really wonderful support team that's speaking to our merchants every single day, and they have this sort of deep understanding of what their struggles are because they're spending so much time with them. So this is a photo of a fresh eyes, which is where our designers present work that they're working on, and we actually started to invite our gurus, our support team, to these fresh eyes. And they're able to provide that merchant perspective of, okay. Here's what I think about this design given what I know about our merchants. And, of course, you'll get a lot of ad hoc tickets, requests, what have you.
You'll probably hear a lot of preferences instead of problems. And a colleague of mine, Gabriel, says that it works really well for problem hypothesis. So you kind of come up with a hypothesis of what your problems might be, and then your next step is to design research to validate it. So in this case, we actually ended up launching a full branding project for our wallet because we realized no one knew what it was. So that was helpful.
Listen first. Create your problem hypotheses from existing feedback, and then use research to validate if there's a wider problem. Next, I did a diary study. So again, super generational. Like I wasn't even looking at Shopify checkouts in this.
I was looking at checkouts, and I wanted to understand how people spoke about their experiences on checkouts. Here are all these really great screenshots that people sent me. I got to like vicariously shop through a bunch of people. I wanted to know if they were talking about a checkout being accelerated or being personalized. Nobody was talking about how personalized it was.
Nobody was talking about how quick it was. And I also noticed that most people aren't shopping purely functionally. It isn't like, well, I needed this chair, so I put this chair into my cart, and then I brought my cart to check out, and then I bought it, and I'm a happy camper. A lot of people are, like, designing outfits in their carts. They're building wish lists.
They're putting together dream vacations that they'll never afford. There are a lot of reasons to use a checkout that aren't just to buy the thing. So I asked them, describe this checkout experience. One of the quotes was, buying lilac soap for the guest bathroom. So like very functional, pretty boring.
One of them was retail therapy, like, having fun. One of them, the only answer was fucking expensive. I was like, okay. This is interesting because what we've been assuming is important, which is put your money in and get out of this checkout, might not be important to them depending on what they're valuing at this point in time. So I started to ask myself, okay.
When someone is doing this, or in your case, when someone is doing blah, what is important to them about doing it? In some cases, if somebody is shopping for retail therapy, they don't want to put something in their cart and have it on their next door tomorrow. They might want that extra time and space to enjoy their retail shopping experience. We've assumed that the most important thing is different from what's actually important to that person. Has anyone read this article?
Okay. I'm gonna act it out. So, okay. Ralph Amber wrote a really great Medium piece about the simplification of products. And they said that at the very beginning, we had engineers, and they were mostly building the things for people.
So you have your engineer and he's building, and then this thing is a GIF, and it's like, what? And the user is here, and they're like, oh, god. And then he said designers are introduced. New slide. And there's an engineer and a designer who's grappling with all this, like, little magician, and then the user is standing here and they have, like, 2 buttons.
And they're like, alright. And then he said that we started building more complex problems. So we have a designer and an engineer, and they're both doing this hairball thing. It's, like, really cool and crazy. And then the user on the other side just has one button.
And he goes on to say that simplification is a powerful design strategy. But in some cases, the experience that you're designing isn't simple. It actually might be complex enough to deserve the user's attention. There might be consequences about that experience that they need the time to understand. They actually need to be given that opportunity to know the effects of the experience.
And that sounds kind of heavy, but even if you look at shopping, like these are people's finances we're talking about. It is actually really important to give them the opportunity to give us their attention if it's warranted. So as we talk about taking care of attention, remember that sometimes the attention is needed. And you'll know when their attention is needed when it's something that's important to them. So So think about what's important to them, and then think about where you're guiding their attention.
Workshops. So Sabino is up here literally saying that product managers needed to come more workshops at Shopify. Here's a workshop I had. There's a product manager in the corner, and this particular one was called an assumption slam. So in yoga and meditation, the practitioner's aim is generally to drop the ego.
But what's interesting is you don't drop it by ignoring that it's there, and like pretending you don't have an ego. You have to recognize it. It's like what Vivianne was saying about shame. Your first step to overcoming that shame is noticing it, noting that it's there with you, and then understanding how you're going to react and deal with it. So an assumption slam is an opportunity where I bring everyone on the team, designer, product manager, data analyst, everyone, to get their assumptions out on the table to, like, really inflate their ego, and then map them out on a quadrant of what's important, what's really risky if we get this wrong, what's less important, And what have we validated?
Like, what do we know? We can kind of assume this. It's like, I think the sky's blue. And what do we really not know? What have we not validated yet?
And then I get that little upper quadrant of the riskiest assumptions being held by the people that are building the experiences for our users, and my job becomes to get a little more evaluative and see what I can find out about those assumptions, and then hopefully drop the ones that are wrong as we continue to move forward in design. Nobody's going to listen to your research if they're not ready to admit what they don't know. They need to be willing to look for new meaning and new clarification. And even if you present them with a study that gives that new meaning and clarification to them, bringing them into the initial process and realizing that they have those assumptions to begin with will really help them adopt that new understanding. Okay.
I have to talk about information architecture, not because this is the study I did last week and I was like, yeah. I'll include this. It's my most recent thing. But I think it's one of the most powerful tools we have when we're designing mindful experiences. Because when we place information on the page, we're kind of architecting that information.
We can really empower or persuade our users to do a certain thing depending on how we arrange the information because we're conveying meaning by how we arrange it to them. If we're effective, it's a really huge amount of power. Again, going back to the consequences of an online shopping experience, if we're arranging checkouts in a way that are only optimizing for conversion, then we could really be screwing some people out of their money, out of things that they don't actually need. So I found out what teams had plans to put stuff on the cart. I presented them to buyers to understand their mental models of how they interacted and how they related to one another.
And then I understood their relationship between the elements based on what was important to them, based on what they were trying to accomplish when on a checkout. So not super new. One thing to note though is that that checkout has been around since like 2011, and I walked into a team and I was like, I'm gonna look at how we did arrange this because I don't know. So be brave. Have courage.
Finally, again, Vivienne's amazing talk. She mentioned picking up on emotions, like being aware of the emotions in the room. This is something I've started adding to every single study that I do, and it's just asking somebody how that makes them feel. It can be more complex in, like, a desirability, sorry, desirability toolkit where they pick between words that express the experience for them. You can show them emoji voting to have them tell you which emoji they most feel like, or you can really just say, if you could explain how you feel in 3 words, what would those 3 words be?
Explore the emotional impact of the experience that you're building. And then last but not least, running parallel to my work has been a huge accessibility effort from our fed. We have an accessibility champion. Andrea is gonna give a really great talk later about how to do research around accessibility. But we're reaching WCAG compliance, and we're considering everyone that we might be excluding.
Not only those with screen readers and assistive technology, but people in different situations that might be trying to shop and might not be included in that experience. It's if you wanna come talk to me about this afterwards, it's not that hard to find somebody that uses assistive technology to come in and test your thing. This is our checkout a year ago or so, and this is Ryland, who's really great. He's given us amazing feedback. Be inclusive.
Like, don't leave people out. That's mean. Alright. So I'm like at this red line right now. I'm nowhere near my evaluative research.
I am still trying to figure out how humans think about buying online. I think that in most of the products that have been around for decades, retail included, but I'm sure you might be working on something that's already existed in some form, there's a path laid out to take that we're accustomed to. We know in retail, for example, that the aisles will be wide enough, the stuff will be on the side, the checkout will be near the door, and we're accustomed to that. The clerk might even remember your name if it's a neighborhood store. But that gets flipped upside down as we continue to introduce more devices and more technology that are asking for our users' attention.
They might not particularly feel like they're lost in the experience, but their attention might feel a bit lost. We have to optimize the values that align with their well-being and ask for their attention based on what's important to them about the task to help them map out their own way. We have to think like landscape architects. We need to landscape our products so that we guide our users through the experience, and it's not requiring all of their attention. Just the attention we need at the point in time that we need it based on what's important to them.
Maybe accelerated doesn't mean that a checkout happens in a blink of an eye. I'm sure that we all work on products that have put a premium on time to completion, But is that an effective metric when we think about mindful experiences? Maybe some things should be accelerated and take quicker to complete, but maybe people do need a space to reflect. Think about the complex. Actually, consider the thing that they're doing because it's important to them.
Maybe personalized doesn't mean that your product knows the person's name, their mom's name, and what they did that morning. Maybe personalized means understanding enough about them to give them a space that they can express themselves in. A space that aligns with their values or their goals. Maybe that's a space to feel excited or reassured or creative or successful, not stressed out. So I know I talked a lot, and a lot of it was about checkout, but if I oh, yes.
I'm not gonna show up. Talk to me later. I have like 5 things you can keep in mind.
Thank you.
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