Target Last-Mile Delivery
Objective:
A product that enables users to claim a delivery route, arrive at a warehouse, pick up 50-100+ packages, and deliver all of them.
Now Shipt’s most profitable product, Target Last-Mile Delivery (TLMD) started out as a scrappy, “small rock” initiative. My UX role on this project was not only to design user flow, error handling, and connect our systems with the retailer, but to help research / interview people who do this type of work, discover what their needs and pain points are, and established systems to ensure this product was as automated as possible.
Role:
Sole Lead UX/UI Designer
Duration
3.5 months to MVP, Iterations post launch for another 3 months
Anchoring to physical space
This design kicked off in 2021, and access to the Sortation Center was limited. Being a visual person, I started with quick representative sketches to fill the gap of real life experience. That, a few photographs and a warehouse blueprint were all I had to go off of. From there I took a standard service design approach. I tried to account for a very simple UI and action a user would take, and what had to happen in the physical world to complete Target’s tightly coupled process.
New design patterns
Most of the UX included existing design system components, but given the specific requirements for accessing and picking up orders, I contributed 3 major modal types to aid the user.
QR Modal
How a user would be granted access to the property. This was the first time our app had made direct calls to a retailer in real time. The QR would be generated upon tapping to view.
Instructional Modal
Since this is a complex operation where everything needs to go right for logistics to stay on track, I implemented these instructional modals for drivers to break the autopiloting through the flow and understand simply and clearly the exact task that is coming up.
Multiscan Modal
Drivers would need to scan upwards of 100+ packages at pickup. This modal provided a check list and progress of their scanning without having to surface and resurface a single scanner every time.
MVP Pickup UX
Here’s a bird’s eye view of the full arrival and pickup flow.
Service Callouts
It was important to know what is happening behind the scenes when a user interacts with the flow. these callouts helped us stay in line with the process, and also help eng know the exact point that we were talking to our retailer.
Full experience
Long haul drivers are a different type of user than the Shopper app had built for for years. Through research, interviews, and user alpha tests we uncovered all the products that didn’t work, and bifurcated them. Things like onboarding, scheduling, offering, and support all needed to be different. I led as an advocate/designer for all of these points. The bifurcation has come to be a challenge to maintain, but it was the quickest solution besides doing nothing. In the long run, this has helped our users get the bespoke experience they needed to do the work.
Success and scaling
The experience scaled to 12 metros in the same year. The peak season had an aggressive ramp, and the only worry our team had was that we’d have enough people to handle the deliveries on our platform. This style of modular user flows that began in TLMD worked so well that the rest of the app followed suit. It led to making our whole fulfillment plan being modular, and that investment from the business kicked of a standardization/server-driven UI project I led with engineering called “Fulfillment Engine”.