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Customer Portal Evolution
Customer Portal Evolution
Atlas Coffee Club
Q1-Q4 2024
Project
Overview
As Senior Product Designer, I was asked to make our subscription portal more intuitive and engaging. In close collaboration with my PM, I reviewed analytics to ID the top tasks–and built a faster path for them. I then layered in visuals that allowed our customers to see themselves in the brand-with tantalizing coffee visuals that drove exceptional growth.
The design ask
We wanted to make it quick and easy for customers to customize their subscription–so that they had time to drink in stories about the coffee. Based on quantitative data from our users, we knew that when our users took notes about their coffees or rated them, they were far more likely to retain, and I designed to amplify this strength.
Challenges we overcame
Our site was inconsistent, with confusing nomenclature across key parts of our customer's journey. We devoted time to thoughtful refinement to improve this element of the experience, transitioning to the language norms for interactions found in iOS and Google Material Style UI.
The outcome
Over the course of a year, we created a quick path and an enriched path for our users, allowing them jump in and experience juicy origin stories quickly, on their phone.
pushing through complexity
I love a complex design challenge, and reworking our whole logged in experience was a multi-layered cake of a job. Atlas had multiple layers of product development from 12 years as a subscription business. The resulting experience felt scattered.
As we transitioned to Shopify, I took the opportunity to create a calming and cohesive experience. I pushed our cross functional team to share stories from the incredible relationships they had built with our growers and made space for them in our portal making the experience juicy and delicious for our customers.
Assessing the product
I love to map a process and create efficiency. In this case I dove into Information Architecture (IA) analysis and testing new IA to make our user portal both more fun to use and more profitable for the business.
I plotted out both a quick path to action and an enriched path, both of which flowed seamlessly through to checkout.
Wireframing for clarity
I collaborated closely with the product owner to codify and clarify our nomenclature, aligning it with standard e-commerce terms such as "Dashboard" and "Subscription." I differentiated user account categories—such as contact and payment details—placing them clearly within an "Account" section.
To reduce clutter, I advocated moving this information into a mobile-friendly kebab menu, prominently highlighting core subscription actions at the top of the Dashboard. Finally, I mapped out a consistent nomenclature system that aligned with established iOS and e-commerce naming conventions.
Our customers want the enriched journey
Our team performed retention and click-rate analyses, examining user behavior to identify patterns associated with higher retention and churn over the past 6 and 12 months.
Our analysis taught us that customers who engaged with portal features such as noting coffee details and browsing their past coffee origin countries had significantly better retention. This was a strong signal that storytelling about coffee origins should be emphasized throughout the customer journey. I designed new cards to highlight the beauty of our origin regions, and ensured that they were easy to use on a phone.
A/ B Testing wins
I guided our storytelling in a customer-centered direction, with the hypothesis that if you show your target audience a tantalizing moment they recognize themselves in, and they’ll dive in—deepening their connection to the brand and fueling growth.
We conducted several rounds of A/B testing against our prior Ads, and our first Variant drove triple digit cart volume growth with the new Ad images and layout.
I worked with my Product Owner and Creative team member to create a library of images that would have a similar impact, and we continued to see outstanding upsell growth.
