Anyway

I just bought some­thing on the Cana­dian Lowes site and it struck me how much time and thought they obvi­ously put into the UX. The item pages con­tained the usu­al recom­men­ded oth­er items, reviews, etc, that you can see every­where. It was the oth­er inform­a­tion on the item page that caught my attention.

I found the item through online search, but it was easy, with obvi­ous bread­crumbs, to find related items. The ‘ship­ping included’ was prom­in­ent but not over­power­ing (for a large item, I prefer it to be shipped to me but don’t want to pay a for­tune for ship­ping). The page included links, near the ‘Add to Cart’ but­ton, to both the ship­ping and return policies, and the estim­ated ship­ping date was easy to see, even before adding the item to the shop­ping cart.

The big changes that I noticed came next. Where so many shop­ping sites ask you to cre­ate an account, login, etc, this one simply re-con­figured the check­out work­flow. After the usu­al steps (fill out ship­ping address, pay through paypal/credit cards) there were two things I noticed. First, the return page gave the option of adding anoth­er email address to have the noti­fic­a­tion sent there as well, sug­gest­ing I not close the page until the email noti­fic­a­tion arrived (which it did, promptly). And second, it was only after the trans­ac­tion was com­pleted that the site asked me if I wanted to add a pass­word so I could track the status of the ship­ment. I can track the status using a link in the noti­fic­a­tion email but I added a pass­word any­way. So now I also have a Lowes account, cre­ated with very little friction.

This seems a sens­ible time to encour­age the site vis­it­or to cre­ate an account. I’d already bought some­thing, it’s quite likely I’ll buy oth­er large items in the same way, and it did­n’t take much time or decision-mak­ing. Kudos to Lowes for listen­ing to their UX people.