Amazon Search CX
Enhancing product evaluation and purchase in search results
Context & Role
My current team at Amazon is a key partner to the Search CX core team. We contribute to their innovation roadmap by ideating and building features to make customers search tasks more efficient.
Since Q4 2022 I lead the UX efforts in the themes of Product Evaluation and Purchase in the search results space.
Overview
Our vision for the Product Evaluation and Purchase space is to include a quick shopping experience within our users main task: Search.
By enabling customers to quickly access product information —like product variations and visual— and add items to their cart, our goal is to make product discovery and purchase faster and more efficient.
Add to Cart
Enabling customers to add items to their cart faster.
Overview
This ongoing project focuses on eliminating a common frustration for Amazon customers: the extra steps required to add items to their cart. Traditionally, shoppers had to navigate to product detail pages to complete this action, which disrupted the flow of their basket building experience.
Our vision was to enable seamless “Add to Cart” functionality directly from the search results.
Foundations of the project
We launched our initial experiment in early 2023, starting with the Everyday Essentials category of high-demand, repeat-purchase consumable products. The results exceeded expectations with a projected annual revenue increase of $549M and a measurable rise in customer purchasing behavior, with Units Per Purchase improving by 0.38%.
This represented a success for our organization as it broke old hypotheses like that the increasing the height of the result cards drove less revenue. Encouraged by this success, we expanded the feature to more categories, leading to another $669.5M in annualized revenue.
However, this seemingly straightforward concept came with many complexities. We had to ensure the design worked across a variety of product types.
Other edges cases surfaced as we expanded the scope of the feature on Amazon’s catalogue. In order to get a fully coherent CX, we also built a companion button for items that couldn’t be added from search results – e.g. legally restricted products or customizable items – allowing customers to “See options” for that item in the product’s own page. This ensured a coherent CX that set customers expectations correctly, avoiding a false sense of unavailability for those specific products.
Introducing such a significant UX change came with potential customer concerns—how would users perceive adding to the cart directly from search results? To mitigate this, we employed A/B testing and customer research along every step.
Accomplishments
- Collaboration with Design System: As part of this project, we established ourselves as key experimentation partners with the Design System team, ensuring our findings influenced broader shopping design strategies. These partnerships were instrumental in creating a more consistent and optimized shopping experience across Amazon.
- Rebuilding Cross-team Relationships: A major outcome was the rebuilding of trust with the Search Core CX design team, where previous friction had impacted collaboration. This project helped course-correct our relationship, establishing a smoother, more aligned working process moving forward.
Afterword
This is an ongoing project with a strong feature roadmap for the upcoming years, for which I’ve organized several ideation processes within our product team to map our short-term experimentation plan but also the vision of purchasing complex items in the search space.