When is pricing helpful, and how should it appear?

Who and what

Starbucks wanted to know how customers would use pricing on different pages in the app, and which areas improved their experience the most.

Project goals

We wanted to learn:

• Which designs give the highest sentiment and least balk? 
• At what point do customers discover pricing? 
• When do customers want to see pricing? 
• How do customers want to see pricing represented on each page?

What we did

Our UX Designer had already done a variety of explorations on different placements and treatments for pricing, so I focused on testing where and how customers would want to see costs. Since we needed to produce results in two weeks, I used unmoderated tests for discovery and comprehension and supplemented them with a round of moderated interviews.

Studies:

• Unmoderated usability studies
  • Participants saw one design and were asked to complete tasks. After they were asked questions around their comprehension and discovery of pricing.
  • 74 participants
• Unmoderated comparison study
  • Participants saw snippets of each design and were asked to select which design was most helpful per page.
  • 25 participants
• Moderated usability study
  • Participants were asked to complete tasks on all 3 designs and asked questions about comprehension, discovery, and preference.
  • 6 participants
• Total: 3 designs, 105 total participants

Limitations

Due to a tight timeline, the UX team only had two weeks to build prototypes and produce research results. As a result, I leaned into unmoderated studies to achieve the scope I wanted while keeping a short turnaround time.

The outcome

The studies validated the UX team’s original hypothesis that customers would prefer more information in order to make educated purchasing decisions. An interesting additional finding was that a middle ground of transparency (showing final totals but not the full breakdown of pricing) hurt customer perceptions of cost, and had more negative outcomes than showing no price at all.

My findings were presented to leadership and they redirected the working team from a risky design path to one that was more helpful to customers. The team also re-prioritized which placements would be developed first based on which areas were most important to customers in the purchasing journey.

Reflection

This project had a very limited timeline which prevented me from doing more rigorous testing around what customers would do behaviorally with different levels of pricing information. In a perfect world, I would have loved to team up with our data science team to run an A/B test to see how customer behaviors changed with the different information shown.