DonorsChoose Universal Shopping: The first integrated e-commerce experience within DonorsChoose's teacher project creation process, streamlining shopping, improving usability, and significantly reducing drop-off rates to help teachers complete their projects more efficiently.
The challenge:
Teachers use DonorsChoose to request classroom supplies by creating a project. The project creation process requires teachers to share classroom details, explain the impact of their requested supplies, and shop across multiple vendor sites.
Teachers must leave the DonorsChoose platform to shop and then return to complete their project. This interruption leads to confusion and frustration, resulting in a 47% drop-off rate
The solution:
I designed a familiar and consistent e-commerce experience, allowing teachers to shop seamlessly within the project creation process.
By applying our research insights, I prioritized key product details to help teachers make informed purchasing decisions. If you want to learn more about on how we got here, details below!
As a result, drop-off rates decreased to 21%, and average project completion time dropped from 2 hours to just 30 minutes!
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The details:
A frustrating shopping experience hurting completion rates
Through extensive research and usability testing, we uncovered key pain points in the shopping experience. Interviews with teachers revealed frustration with inconsistent vendor interfaces, difficulty completing projects on mobile, and the overwhelming time commitment required to shop across multiple vendors. These insights guided our approach to improving the e-commerce experience within DonorsChoose.
Since teachers had to shop across multiple vendor sites, we needed to understand which product details—price, color, size, and more—were essential for their decision-making.
To streamline this process, we explored third-party platforms that could search across vendor databases and surface products directly within DonorsChoose. We identified Algolia as the best solution and used it as the foundation for building the Universal Shopping Experience.
My role in this project:
I was the lead designer, focusing on experience, usability, front-end styling and structuring.
