Feeling like a regular…anywhere

That feeling when you walk into your local coffee shop and the barista says, “The usual? Coming right up.” Priceless! Compare that with the feeling you get visiting a new doctor and having to explain your entire life story just to get a basic prescription. Cannabis is extremely nuanced and customers are often juggling many considerations as they try to decide what products to buy. Talking with cannabis shoppers we found that most feel closer to the doctor scenario. When interviewing budtenders (cannabis experts behind the counter at stores), we found they were asking the same questions over and over. This was an opportunity.

There are higher stakes when buying cannabis because it alters your state of mind. Customers should feel taken care of and in control through the process of making that purchase decision.

The story starts with onboarding

Defining the user journey

Our initial goal was to create a robust onboarding process to then create a highly customized storefront and shopping experience based on the information they provided. It would be dynamic and visually interesting. Hint: we didn’t go this route in the end. There were too many clicks and during usability testing, users were taking multiple minutes to get through the flow and given too many choices on each screen were hesitating to click and move on to the next screen. We were going to lose to many potential users before they even hit the storefront.

Back up a second

Working across engineering and design we knew that the logic used in the original onboarding was essentially walking the user through the process of filtering. While working through our onboarding flow I was also working through the filter window design. User research and competitor analysis had made it clear that the current e-commerce options treated different product types the same (edibles, tinctures, flower, etc), with these limited filter options used on all categories. We knew this wasn’t going to cut it and set out to create detailed filters for each product type.

Nuanced filters that could be leveraged further

Iterating to surface value

After working through the complexities of filters and the data nuances associated with it, we shipped detailed filter options across all seven categories. It was robust and held a lot of potential for users but it felt impersonal AND it still didn’t solve the “telling your whole life story at the doctor’s office” issue.

Preference sets and creating clarity with color

Defining visual design solutions and testing with users

I then designed what I called “preference sets.” This allowed users who knew they had a preferred way of shopping to create a set of filters with a name, save it, and use it next time, even at another dispensary. This was also category specific, so if they only cared about finding their gluten free high CBD chewables in the edibles category, then they could make a preference set for that and nothing else. This task required a two-fold solution that was feasible from an engineering standpoint (we needed to move quickly) and was clear enough to users (initial usability tests showed confusion around when they were using filters vs. the preference sets). I created an “edit mode” using color, clear intro copy, and a prominent button to add new filters to make it clear and retain existing logic and architecture from the original filters feature that already existed.

Ultimately the preference set feature will continue to evolve. Newly released we have some initial feedback with mixed results. The color field for editing mode makes it much clearer to users that they are editing the preference set and not filtering normally and feedback has been very positive around being able to name and save favorite parameters for shopping. However, with the feature living within the filter window, it is still too hard to find and there remains a high probability that users, if they don’t click to filter, may not discover the value.