How we simplified & personalized checkout across Gap Inc.
Role: Senior Product Designer
Duration: ~6 months
Partners: PM, Eng, A11y, Copy, UXR, Data Analytics
Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta all shared one clunky, dated checkout flow. Everything auto-opened regardless of who you were, so a returning loyalty member clicked through the exact same steps as a first-time guest. There was no personalization, limited product detail, and plenty of dead clicks along the way. We set out to fix that, using what we already knew about the customer to skip steps that didn't need to exist and simplify the ones that did.
I took over the redesign from another designer (shoutout Charlene!) who'd done the early problem-definition and mockups. I pushed it from there through launch. Then, after launch, conversion dipped and I had to figure out why.
How we got there
This new condensed checkout didn't happen by accident. Getting there meant surfacing far more edge cases than we'd originally mapped. Was the customer authenticated or not? A loyalty member or not? Did they hit the free shipping threshold? Did they have saved cards or preferences? Small details, but each one changed what the "right" checkout experience looked like.
The dip
Eventually, we sorted through the edge cases and made it to launch. Conversion dipped almost immediately, and there wasn't much insight into why, just real pressure to figure it out fast, since this had leadership visibility.
I dug in and brainstormed with our PDM, then went straight to the data. FullStory session replays, heat maps, drop-off points, dead clicks. We identified a handful of likely friction spots, and rolled fixes out one at a time as Checkout 2.0. This way, we'd know exactly what moved the needle.
Three fixes, up close
The payoff
No single fix moved the needle on its own, but together, the 2.0 tests added up. Compared to the original checkout flow, conversion rose 0.2% and time spent in checkout dropped 3%, meaningful gains at Gap's scale.