Castorama: pick-up delivery

Overview

Brand - Castorama France

Castorama France is the French equivalent of B&Q in the United Kingdom and Ireland, a major DIY and home improvement retailer. They have over 100 stores across France, and like B&Q, they offer a wide range of tools, equipment and supplies for all household projects.

I worked on the ‘Pick Up Delivery’ Checkout journey for Castorama France in 2024.

Problem

Castorama France identified a customer preference for secure, cheaper and convenient online parcel delivery collection. Castorama wanted to pilot collection services in 2024 through a minimum viable product (MVP).

Online parcel delivery collection also addresses a common challenge in the French market, where deliveries are often left in unsecured locations like PO boxes or doorsteps.

Castorama's goal is to leverage the existing network of collection points with third parties to enhance customer experience and security.

Adding parcel delivery collections enables customers to pick up at convenient locations, such as pharmacies, cafes and newsagents. And then save the business money from the use of third-party couriers.

Note: only products shipped by fulfilment centres would be eligible for pick-up delivery for the MVP.

Checkout designs

I worked on designing the Checkout section of the ‘Buy journey’ which starts from a Product Display Page.
I was told to make the most useful and frictionless journey for our French customers.
Castorama Poland, another Kingfisher brand, have released Locker online parcel delivery collection and Castorama France aimed for their online checkout experience to be a ‘step-up’ from that.

Team

I was the Product Designer within a multidisciplinary product team consisting of:

Product Owner based in France.
Design Researcher based in France.
Project Manager (managing Engineers) based in England.
Business Analyst based in England
Technical lead based in Ukraine
and Engineers based in Ukraine

Results

Frictionless experience with 0% task fail rate.
23% cost reduction vs existing home delivery routes.
MVP conversion results and other relevant metrics are pending as this is being implemented.

Castorama France website (July 2024)

Castorama France is part of Kingfisher PLC (parent company of B&Q, Screwfix etc)

Develop: Competitor analysis

and designs

We conducted a competitive analysis of French e-commerce checkout experiences. This analysis, focussed on competitor practices for displaying product delivery routes.

Our observations revealed a consistent approach among French competitors. Products eligible for home delivery or delivery to collection points are clearly communicated to customers as radio buttons. This finding aligned with the checkout experience of Kingfisher’s Polish brand, Castorama Poland, for online order locker collections too.

This went on to inform my designs to do the same but with a slight difference from Castorama Poland. Encapsulating the collection point details in a box felt unnecessary and felt like it added ‘tension’ to the design so I got rid of this. This allowed a more seamless interaction.

To select a collection point the customer would go through a ‘Drawer dialog’ which is straightforward. This followed the convention of how customers change their ‘Click + Collect’ store across our brands. Doing this allows consistent and familiar interaction across our digital products.

Below is the first iteration of the design I made using Figma.

Competitor review and using existing patterns used on www.castorama.fr and www.castorama.pl.

Note: please expand images to see the whole UI. My website builder is not able to scale an image to fit the gallery!

Deliver: Usability Testing Round 1

To check risky assumptions, we conducted three rounds of remote, unmoderated usability testing on UserTesting.com. Doing this ensured we identified potential customer experience issues leading to poor conversion before the MVP release itself. Each round had specific research questions addressed. These research questions were operationalised by me.

In round 1 we tested the following:

Are people able to understand how to select a collection point delivery on the checkout page?
- 70% of participants passed this.
- No action was taken and the small risk of customers scrolling and searching to make a selection was accepted by us due to the constraints of the design of the checkout.
Are people able to find opening hours when selecting a relay point?
- 40% of people passed this.
- We had an action to make opening hours visible after selection too as participants expected opening hours to be shown then.
Can people easily select a relay point in the Drawer dialog component?
- 70% of participants passed this.
- Participants revealed a preference for visual aids like maps, this functionality was deferred to prioritise a MVP launch.
Do people understand relay point messaging alerts regarding storage?
- 60% of people noticed the delivery storage messaging.
- We decided to take this out and allow external comms (i.e emails) to deal with delivery storage time frames. As we were not confident this information is needed at this point.

Throughout the tasks participants showed confusion regarding the continued presence of a delivery address during and after collection point selection. To address this, I designed a new clear and elevated alert confirming selection and revised content to emphasise the address association with the order, not delivery.

Below are the positive remarks, issues raised and changes made after round 1 of Usability Testing.

Miro board noting our observations across the participants in Round 1 of Usability Testing.

Note: please expand images to see the whole UI. My website builder is not able to scale an image to fit the gallery!

Deliver: Usability Testing Round 2 and Round 3

In the second round of usability testing: we evaluated task completion for mixed fulfilment orders (store collection + delivery), specifically focusing on people’s ability to proceed with delivery selection within the complex screen layout.
Our tests indicated a concerning 50% failure rate, which needed immediate design attention. This on top of the last round of testing where 30% of people struggled to understand what to do.

This led to me introducing a ‘disabled button’ telling customers to select their delivery method. Which worked more like an alert informing the customer what action to take if they’re pondering what to do. The disabled button is enabled after a selection is made.

Then, in our final round of unmoderated Usability Testing, we tested the design again with the ‘disabled CTA’. And we achieved a 0% fail rate. This allowed us then to approve the design and handover the work to developers.

Below are the positive remarks, issues raised and changes made after after round 2 and 3 of Usability Testing.