Project Summary
The integration of a new subscription model in an existing purchase flow, and the design of a new “linking” tool for previously purchased subscriptions.
Role Summary
Disciplines: Research, UX, UI, Prototyping
Platforms: Mobile Web, Desktop Web
Rest of Team: Product Owner, Developers
Objective
Enable users to buy our extended warranty products using monthly payments.
Being able to pay for AppleCare with monthly payments was a top request from Apple Support customers. The other big request was theft-and-loss coverage, which launched simultaneously to this effort and the design efforts around that product had to be coordinated with the integration of monthly pricing.
Features
Integration into the Online Sales flow and the post-purchase My Support flow.
The designer for the theft-and-loss project was following a marcom template “by the book”, and so came up with a first pass layout that adhered to one of their templates: product name on left, pricing on right. It was clear to me that this layout worked pretty well for short product names (iPhone X, MacBook Pro, etc.) and one-time prices, it quickly fell apart when trying to accommodate longer names and more complicated pricing.
After discussion (and several rounds of mockups and critiques), I came up with the design that you see in the above GIF: two-line naming and pricing, separating the items so that they are clear. We decided to drop the font size of the pricing down slightly, but still keep it at semibold.
There are many integration examples in the live My Support tool.
Features
Creation of a brand-new “linking” tool
The Apple “system of record” for managing subscriptions is iTunes. For the most part that works, because people are logged into their iTunes accounts (Apple ID) when they make an iTunes-based subscription purchase. That is decidedly not the case for AppleCare subscriptions. Most of our sales are 3rd party or through the Retail or Online stores. In all of these channels, Apple ID is either never going to be asked or is presented as an optional log-in.
This isn’t an issue until the user wants to manage their account, like to change a billing card. So we had to build a system to allow purchases to be linked to iTunes.
I designed a flow in OmniGraffle to get our development partners and business partners in sync, so we could all understand what was happening where. No one on the business side could understand the dev version of this.
Results
Making the complex simple.
I was able to boil what was a pretty complex systems flow down to a four-step process. There are many other screens - including 9 distinct errors and a flow for adding new subscriptions to the list using a modal - but the heart of the flow is simple.
