Order Tracking

How might we provide customers with accurate and timely information so that they can feel confident and plan for delivery?

Role
Lead Designer

Collaborators
Supply Chain, Customer Service

Outcome
23% Reduction in order tracking call volume

Timeline
12 weeks

The Problem

  • 37% of all calls to our contact centre were related to order tracking.

  • The order tracking experience was limited to 5 simple statuses, meaning there was a lack of clarity for customers.

The Solution

After completing discovery, planning, research, and user testing, I created a solution that incorporated learnings about various backend infrastructures, various codes received from carriers, and what customers expect from shipping and handling when making online purchases.

Key enhancements:

  • Visual indicator to help with the progression of the order.

  • Rewritten statuses that follow industry standards and added context when needed.

  • Reorganized the hierarchy to help with discoverability, scannability and managing reading patterns.

  • Designed for error scenarios such as delays, cancellations and fraud, as well as the introduction of returns tracking.

Visual Indicators

Introduced visal indicators to help with scanning and quick digestion of informatrion.

Communicate the bad

Through user interviews, customers expect to be over communicated with and that means telling them whats going wrong.

Multi-Shipment

Staples is limited in how we can ship out orders due to stock availability and warehouses across the country. I had to organize orders that shipped out in multiple packages within one order number.

Email Enhancements

  • Created a visual hierarchy to help customers read the most important content first.

  • Introduced linking to allow continuation of the journey from email to website.

  • Collaborated on the subject line to ensure emails didn’t get seen as spam.

What Went Wrong?

Although the numbers tell a different story, the overall success of the feature launch was unsuccessful. After launch, the backend codes were not routed to our front-end endpoints, causing customer-facing statuses to be incorrect. Most of our customer tracking journeys were stuck at “Shipped”.

Alongside the problems above, the email enhancements and returns experience were deprioritized until Q2 2025, creating a large gap in the communication of order statuses.

The Process

Discovery Audit

Audited the current experience and referenced the competitive landscape to identify a design strategy and rolling handoff design cycle.

Mapped the complete back-end infrastructure from order placement to delivery, highlighting how evolving warehouse systems and varying inventory across Staples' multiple warehouses impacted the customer experience, especially for multi-item shipments.

Back-end Infrastructure

Discovery Interviews

Interviewed 5 users who have placed orders within the past week to understand how they go about their order-tracking journey.

Customers tend to track their order when it is of high value, urgent, for their business, delayed or from a place they do not normally buy from.

When do customers track packages?

When tracking orders, customers track via all available forms, such as through email, the site directly or the shipping carrier sites.

How do customers track packages?

How do Customers like to be contacted?

Customers prefer emails over text messages, as lately, texts have become suspicious.

When communicating with customers, they prefer to be overcommunicated as they can choose what they want to read.

What information do customers like?

who is responsible for shipping?

When things go wrong, they want to deal with the company they bought the item from, not the carrier.

What do customers expect from us?

Customers expect that when things go wrong that we do everything to help correct the situation.

Final Thoughts

This project was one of the most fun and fulfilling projects I have worked on. Being able to help define the roadmap as well as having great product partners made the process smooth. Although the design solution was a fairly simple lift in terms of decision-making, doing the backend discovery and the interviews helped me get a better understanding of what we could and couldn’t do and how we might be able to achieve things from a system perspective.