Wayfair Delivery Instruction Adoption

I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the Add Delivery Instructions flow on Wayfair, Amazon, and Target, to better understand customer expectations. One pain point I observed is that Wayfair only allows delivery instructions on the item level, instead of the address level. This meant that every time you place an order, you need to rewrite the instructions on every item. This unexpected behavior caused frustration for the user and increased the risk of future missed deliveries, especially for B2B customers who can have hundreds or thousands of items per order.

Another gap identified in Wayfair’s experience is the inability to add delivery instructions to an item before it has shipped. This limitation prevented customers from adding instructions at checkout, so they would instead have to wait 48 hours for the item to ship, return to the site, and add instructions without Wayfair prompting this action in any direct way. The overarching issue identified from this evaluation is that adding delivery instructions on Wayfair required a lot more active thought and direct action from the user compared to your typical e-commerce site.

After evaluating the overarching experience, I dove deeper into the delivery instructions form itself to see which fields were table stakes to include. Wayfair only had a single text field to enter all instructions, but most of the e-commerce sites I reviewed had a range of validated fields with specific categories such as “drop-off location”, “security code”, and “business hours”. Call analytics showed that over 75% of Wayfair's delivery instruction requests fit into 3 categories: add gate code, add phone number, or add navigation/drop-off instructions.

Wayfair has 11 different categories of delivery instructions, but customers have no way of knowing what Wayfair considers to be a valid request. To better understand how customers organize categories in their head, I utilized usertesting.com and Optimal Sort to recruit active Wayfair customers for a card sorting exercise.

66% of test participants created the same two groupings - Requests and Contact Info. “Requests” are instructions that customers would like Wayfair to do, but they understand that it may not be possible (such as rerouting an item that is already in transit). The “Contact Info” grouping are options that customers view as permanent and guaranteed to be followed, such as adding a gate code or drop-off location to their order.

For my last piece of discovery I conducted an unmoderated user test to understand where customers look to find the entry point into delivery instructions, pain points in their search process, and to clarify if the existing modal matched their expectations.

Customers were split into two groups - the first group added a gate code to their order, while the second group added a proxy person to sign for their package. Both groups overwhelmingly looked in the checkout page to add their respective delivery instructions. For the sake of speed-to-market, I targeted the 3 highest impact categories (gate code, phone number, navigation/drop-off instructions) to include in the v1 component and I collaborated with the checkout team to ensure that this component would be implemented in checkout for the initial launch.

As I learned from my previous research, customers don’t intuitively know what is considered to be a valid delivery instruction. The first way in which I targeted this was by collaborating with a content strategist to write helper text for each field, providing clear and concise examples of valid instructions. We also created a Help Center article that clarifies what and why we can't always adhere to a customer's instructions, which we link to within the new component.

The problems with the existing delivery instructions component extended to Wayfair’s call center team as well. Much like the customer-facing modal, the internal wizard was just a single open text field where agents could enter anything the customer asked for. This resulted in newer agents having to either guess if an instruction is valid, or put the customer on hold to ask their supervisor. I redesigned this modal to show every available delivery instruction, with example text, so agents can assure customers that the driver will follow their request.

There are a few common requests that get automatically rejected by delivery drivers, such as writing in the instructions to deliver to a different address. I included these in the modal for visibility, but clicking on "Launch Tool" will redirect them to the appropriate wizard to make that change.