The problems

After the public launch of Amazon Business, there was a huge conversion and retention issue with 80% drop-off during registration and a majority of account created abandoned pretty much immediately. Through quantitative and qualitative research, we identified a few key areas that needed to be fixed:

Marketing landing pages
Potential customers didn't think the product was for them because the imagery was too specific to an industry or type of business. Additionally, because there were no images of the actual experience and registration was required to see it, customers had no idea what they were getting and if it was right for their business.

Registration
Since we were built on the Amazon platform, we had to account for net-new customers as well as those who already had Amazon accounts that they used for business purchases. This severely complicated the registration experience, confusing most customers before they could even create an account.

Onboarding
Initially, customers landed on the account management page without any guidance about what to do next. Without knowing what to do next, most customers kept using their primary Amazon accounts for business purchases, leaving their B2B account unused.

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The process

Marketing landing pages

Define & plan

I worked very closely with the Marketing Project Manager and a Visual Designer on my team to understand requirements for the new site:

• Utilize legacy Content Management System

• Allow for customizable content authored by the marketing team

• Allow for multiple segment types

• Allow for deep linking into certain pages from marketing communications

• Incorporate Amazon Corporate branding with an Amazon Business differentiation

• Utilize responsive framework

Once we settled on goals, I facilitated a few white-boarding sessions with the team to ensure agreement on the approach before creating a number of wireframes, conveying how the site would behave on different breakpoints.

Design

After consensus was reached, I digitized the wireframes fleshing out details as I went.

Test

I partnered with the Research team to run these wireframes through usability testing to gather feedback from users across multiple segments and business sizes. In addition to testing the overall flow, the research team conducted a card-sort with users of varying business sizes and industries to understand which features they were looking for in a new procurement system, informing content surfaced on each page.

Based on the findings, I iterated on the most successful design of these pages and collaborated with the developer to split the pages into modular widgets, that allowed for rapid development of new page types to be created as new requirements and business needs expanded. 

Iterate

Then, I worked with the Visual Design to create an Amazon Business UI that worked within the broader Amazon ecosystem while remaining unified under a distinctly B2B brand. To insure primary business goals were met, the visual designer and I acted as design brokers working closely with front-end developers and engineers to coordinate technical & design trade-offs as they arose.

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Registration simplification

Define & scope

Myself, the project's TPM, and Development Manager locked ourselves in a room for a week to brainstorm new ways to streamline the registration flow. We identified a few things that needed improvement:

• The flow began by asking the user to sign in without giving them information about the implications of doing so.

• The language across the flow was confusing and not human-readable.

• There were too many fields to fill out, causing a majority of the flow's drop-off.

• The verification process took 3-5 days (sometimes longer), causing users to wait to purchase items for their business.

• Some features weren't used and could be removed, simplifying the flow.

• In general, there were too many steps to create an account.

After brainstorming, we decided to use an iterative approach, focusing on the low-hanging fruit first – allowing users to self-select their path and simplifying the registration form to only critical data.

Design

Initial wireframes illustrated that the he create new account experience could easily be reduced from 5 page flow to 2 pages total.

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New user onboarding

Define

Since new user onboarding didn't exist at the time, I worked closely with my Project Manager to determine the best approach. The onboarding experience needed to:

• Tell the user why their answers improved the Amazon Business experience

• Account for questions that were removed from the registration flow

• Give customers clear next-steps once they land on their account management page

Gather insights & formulate hypotheses

I began by looking for inspiration across the web and formed a few hypotheses to test:

• A step-wise approach would be very effective in guiding the users through the questions, while allowing them to skip if necessary

• Grouping similar information would helped provide context for the questions

• Incorporating an element of gamification (% complete) would incentivize users to complete all steps in the onboarding process

Design & prototype

I worked with my PM to identify questions we needed to ask and diagramed how the user would proceed through them. From there, I wire-framed a couple of variations to find out how users preferred to proceed through the questions:

The customers we tested with clearly preferred the wizard approach so after wire-framing edge-cases, I created a rough prototype of the end-to-end experience to test.

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The outcomes

Marketing landing pages
New registration for Amazon Business increased by nearly 20% and the marketing team was able to easily create new content & pages for custom verticals and strategic business initiatives with minimal engagement from design and technical support teams.

Registration simplification & new user onboarding
When I left Amazon, we were in the middle of testing the registration and onboarding approaches with users, so I was unable to get metrics from those tests, however I heard they were testing well.

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