1-Click Checkout

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The year is 2019 and Amazon’s 20 year patent 1-Click Checkout is expiring.

As an online prescription benefit management platform, product leaders at OptumRx saw a huge opportunity to improve our own ecommerce checkout flow using this previously protected model. The specific business goal was to improve our order completion rates, and to do so through this unique opportunity of leveraging this long-protected, but now ubiquitous, streamlined checkout flow.

So the order came down: “Design a 1-click solution for our checkout flow for OptumRx!”

The hunch

Believing that the mental models of typical retail Amazon users might diverge significantly from those interacting with a digital prescription benefit platform like ours, I suspected user needs wouldn’t perfectly translate to a one-click experience across these distinct e-commerce products. To bridge this potential gap, a user-centered approach was necessary to understand what our target audience truly desired.

The approach

After pitching this idea, the product team agreed with my recommendation to test my theory and determine a design direction through proactive user research.

Following my lead researcher’s suggestion, we decided that a participatory co-design session would likely yield the greatest directional findings within our given time frame.

Participants were screened for taking one or more maintenance medications, and for an even mix of gender and age. Once the test plan and participant screener was approved, sessions could begin in the onsite panel-style research lab. In total, 15 consumers participated, with 3-4 participants within each group. All but two participants took two or more medications regularly.

The research room itself was chosen in part to accommodate the relatively large groups of participants. Moreover, it provided a large spaces sketching materials, and both in-person and remote viewing of the sessions via several ceiling-mounted cameras and microphones.

As the facilitator for each of the co-design sessions, it was important to prod for clarity and encourage input from all participants, but never to lead the conversation. In between each session, the lead researcher, stakeholders, lab technician, and myself would discuss observations and prepare materials for the next round of participants.

The outcome

Participant groups produced a range of sketched prototypes ranging from prototypical ecommerce checkout experiences to innovative and simplified flows utilizing communication channels like texting and native push notifications.

As the final sessions wrapped, we quickly recapped and condensed our notes. The trends were very apparent well before the final findings deck and executive summary were complete…

1. Depending on the severity of the condition participants envisioned treating, speed was not necessarily more important than clarity and confidence.
2. With a 1-click-style checkout flow, the ability to cancel an order after it’s placed is extremely important (at the time, this product did not have the ability to cancel orders).
3. If the ability to cancel is not available, having an additional step of friction that gives users a chance to review their order before submitting it becomes even more desirable.

After reviewing and socializing the findings, we pivoted to a simplified quick checkout flow and called ‘1-click, with verification’ (tongue-in-cheek). This approach was more difficult to sell at higher levels of the company because it was essentially an improvement to an existing feature rather than a brand new feature that had been promised. However, it ultimately saved precious resources from building something our consumers didn’t really want.

The final design borrowed heavily from the output of the participant sessions, after being put through the lens of solid UX heuristics. Once development was complete, we immediately began to observe value to users.

Usage of the newly-optimized quick checkout flow quickly rose to account for approximately 15% of the total orders submitted through the product.

The total order completion rate, taken as rolling 3-month averages with no other releases directly affecting the order completion flow during this time, was 67.6% completion before release and 72% after. I prefer to use a 3-month rolling average for this measurement to account for the 90-day refill cycles many users are on. It would also include any dip in completion rates caused by users needing to learn a new flow. Thankfully, the improved UX more than made up for any expected temporary decrease.

Best of all, these sessions also provided the teams with research-based evidence arguing for the objective need of an order cancellation feature, and planted the seeds for future streamlined checkout features through texting, email, and native push notification channels.