web design portfolio Webvan

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This was the kind of gig that UI and UX (user experience) experts drool over. You get paid to find the problems, make recommendations and suggestions, and then walk. The client is responsible for actually implementing and engineering your changes. It's as close as a web designer ever gets to playing therapist.

The challenge for Webvan at the time was not only in branding itself but in branding a whole new way of shopping. The vans, delivery people, product, and an immensely complex distribution system were at one end of the customer experience. At the other end was the website. Where to start? A web page can convey only so much beyond its navigation scheme and content. What part of the company and its experience do you emphasize? How do you build it into the site's design and functionality? How do you achieve visual balance among the sites many competing elements耀ome of which were causing real user confusion.

Ultimately, Webvan wanted to build on the many "extras" online groceries could deliver: saved shopping lists, bundled foods w/ daily recipes, regularly scheduled "replacement" lists of staple foods, etc. But before it could get there, it had to guarantee a smooth shopping experience. And even though the van drivers had built an impressive reputation for service and friendliness, if the shopper couldn't schedule a delivery van, there wasn't going to be any webvan customer exerience. There wasn't going to a customer.

As it turned out, the concept wasn't hard to get after all. There may have been some stigma to having groceries delivered (are you that lazy?), but this was the Bay Area during the height of the dotcom craze, and nobody had time to hit Safeway on the way home. So as customers welcomed Webvan deliveries, the challenge facing the company's web team was not to communicating the company mission, but processing orders. Their challenge was to get customers to order as much product as possible, as frequently as possible. And our challenge was to leverage the web to help them get there.

Specifically, the areas we looked at for Webvan were web-based processes like product selection and delivery scheduling, and enhancements like personal shopping lists, recommendations, recipes, etc. Some customers were scheduling deliveries but leaving before checking out. Were they aware of this? Did they mean to leave their shopping carts loaded up behind them? Whether intentionally or not, these customers were tying up delivery vans, and probably going away frustrated.

And when it came to site features and enhancements, the time-saving benefits of shopping online seemed lost on many customers. Why were they not saving their favorite items to a Webvan's personal shopping lists? Was this an interface issue, or a practice issue? Was its solution one of communication, help systems, icon design or navigation? Or was it perhaps less specific; that customers didn't have time to create customized lists when they were actually shopping, and didn't think of it when they weren't? That online shoppers are online shoppers because they're in a rush, and dammit, the benefits of saving time in the long term are negated by the user experience of having to fill out forms when it's lunch time and they still have to hit Amazon before the conference call starts...

The dotcom era phase I was a time in which many companies attempted to launch businesses out of technical efficiencies. Many of them went out of business, but not because they couldn't provide efficiencies. What Peter Drucker said about internet companies applies here: because it's a technology does not mean it's a business. Rephrased: because it's an efficiency does not mean it's a user practice. Users progress much more slowly than technology. It's the user experience designer's job to track that movement. At some point, and it is virtually destined, practices of consumption (shopping, desiring, buying...) will not only accommodate ecommerce but will come to expect it. Consumers will recognize the utility of shopping online. Until then, however, it is important to recognize that we are not a strictly utilitarian species. We live by habit and routine more than by change and transformation. And that's a principle for the UI guy to live by.