Heading
Strategic Collaboration
Strategic Collaboration
Atlas Coffee Club
Q2 2024
Project
Overview
As Senior Staff Product Designer, I redesigned the Atlas Coffee Club subscription purchase flow. As part of the process, I created an inclusive and efficient cross-functional collaboration, incorporating insights from customer service, engineering, and operations teams. This strategy was empowering for our team and increased the speed and quality of our feature releases.
The design ask
Create a gamified top nav that would encourage people to increase their cart volume so as you move through the flow, that as you move through the flow, you're encouraged to add cart volume to get increased savings.
Challenges
Subscription businesses have a very high barrier to trust, and getting someone to commit to a long term purchase relationship is a core challenge. It was therefore critical to establish credibility quickly and give users a compelling reason to commit.
The outcome
I influenced the Product and Customer Experience teams to collaborate on product releases, which evolved into a highly effective partnership that improved product refinement and streamlined development efforts.
I also engaged our stakeholders to support a new à la carte purchase initiative, using it as an opportunity to mature our Design System with intuitive, iOS-style components.
the wins
"Marilee took the initiative to onboard our entire team effectively, ensuring a unified and streamlined design process. Her revamp directly addressed key pain points and greatly enhanced our customer experience. The results speak for themselves: significant lifts in monetization metrics over the previous year."
~Michael, Founder and Director of Operations
"Design review meetings are consistently a gold standard for team collaboration. Information is easy to digest, meetings are guided masterfully."
~Luke, President and Director of Product
"It's clear to me that Marilee has a passion for site accessibility, design, usability, and takes the feedback of customers seriously, always looking to improve the experience."
~ Jenny, Technical Specialist,
Customer Experience Team
prototyping into team efficiency
I created a high-fidelity interactive prototype for a gamified flow. This was a benefit to the team and the business in several ways:
+I conducted rapid testing with this Figma prototype and used it as a tool to engage my Product team in the product evolution.
+It was satisfying and fun to give the Customer Experience (CX) team an interactive prototype preview, which started a highly productive collaboration between our teams.
+The CX team loved this opportunity to avoid repeating any brand communication that caused recurring confusion for customers.
research–Gaining buy in with leadership
As the initiator of UX at the business, I needed to win buy-in from the leadership team. I designed processes that allowed them to participate in prototype research synthesis sessions.
The leadership team enjoyed this process, helping to chart key themes, identify pain points, and culling through core opportunities to meet business goals.
This collaboration ensured our evolving subscription model was both strategically sound and operationally feasible.
Challenges we overcame
+ Subscription businesses have a very high barrier to trust, and getting someone to commit to a long term purchase relationship is a core challenge. It was therefore critical to establish credibility quickly and give users a compelling reason to commit. I created a pithy 1-2-3 overview of our service and our unique value that testing participants proactively noted as the most helpful element in the flow.
+ I ran through this language with our Customer Experience (CX) team lead to insure that the language was understandable.
+ This proactive step with CX sparked a relationship that blossomed. I began sharing previews with their team so that they could prep for launches properly, and their team began sharing connecting me with customers for quatliative interviews. It continued to blossom with their team becoming a strong QA partner for me, and we created an excellent Jira/ Hotjar based process to quickly document and solve key barriers to customer satisfaction.
Prototyping to reduce engineering burden
Our new process removed the pressure on our engineers to build and refine new features in our live product.
+I clarified how a complex set of product requirements and we were able to test how all of the coffee options would operate in realistic iOS interactions.
+We updated to an iOS card based component system that offered both a happy path and a "learn more" state.
