Unattended delivery

Company: Ocado
Role: Senior UX Designer
Year: 2024
Team: 20+
Platform: Web / Apps

Goal

Get groceries to customers even when they’re not at home.

Scope

Designed for 2 retailers, Ocado and Lotte, with Lotte in Korea as the main one.

Impact & Results

Unlocked Ocado’s partnership with Lotte
98% of Lotte’s customers use it

Problem

You’ve probably had a driver call to say “I have a delivery for you, where are you?”, or missed the call and never got your order.

With groceries it’s worse: chilled and frozen food can’t be left waiting. And Ocado’s platform only supported deliveries with someone at home, while Lotte, its partner in Korea, needed orders to arrive whether customers were in or not.

Challenge

Cultural
Need to accommodate both Western and Eastern retailers, as Ocado’s partnerships span diverse regions.
Technical
Current flow working only with planned deliveries, need to scale what was already done.
Collaboration
A lot of different departments were concerned such as e-commerce, logistics, translation, solutions etc…
Testing
The whole interactive prototype needed to be translated to Korean as I wanted to test with real users!

Solution

Customers can now choose unattended delivery when they book their slot. Instead of waiting at home for the driver’s call, they say where the order should be left and how.

What they can set, like where to leave it, entry instructions or packaging for frozen items, depends on how each retailer has set the feature up.

For European retailers, where unattended delivery is less familiar, an onboarding page explains how it works first.

Process overview

Discover
1. Research
Explore
1. Design sprint
Iterate, 2 rounds
1. Design iterations
2. Korean translation
3. Testing with Korean
Ship
1. Engineers handover
2. Design QA

Thinking

To access the feature, the call to action has been placed within the slot booking page where the user can choose a day and a date for the delivery.

The app’s Book a slot screen: the delivery address (Test), the delivery type set to Unattended, and a week of free morning and afternoon slots

Within the unattended delivery flow, users can specify determined delivery instructions.

What the data showed

Research showed that Korean customers often order from somewhere other than home, like a campsite or the beach.

It also showed that users were reluctant to order when it wasn’t clear how their frozen items would be handled.

What I decided

I designed the instructions as an overlay, so users stay in context and can close it whenever they want.

Each delivery type has its own options:

Unattended with no entry instructions, which the client required.
“Other”, for people ordering from somewhere other than home.

Each delivery type also has its own packaging choices. Unattended has two, to fit Korean customers’ needs.

The packaging dropdown is labelled “Frozen items…”, so users know how their frozen items will be handled.

Above the “Confirm” button, I wrote copy that legally protects the client if items are damaged after an unattended delivery.

Learnings

Always have 1–2 months of anticipation for such a big project
Reach out to the sales/solution team in order to get the information earlier
Push back if my designer senses call it a bad idea!

Next projectRecurring order

Goal

Scope

Impact & Results

Problem

Challenge

Cultural

Technical

Collaboration

Testing

Solution

Process overview

Thinking

Learnings