Weedmaps · Consumer growth
Reframing cart and checkout as a growth system
Cart and checkout are often treated as transactional endpoints: the place users go after they have already made a decision. In this project, I reframed them as a high-leverage growth surface where user intent, comprehension, trust, and operational constraints all converge. The work was less about refreshing a page and more about clarifying what the experience needed to do, how teams should evaluate tradeoffs, and which problems were worth solving first.
Context
This work was for Weedmaps, a regulated two-sided marketplace where consumers browse, compare, and place orders through retailers.
The bottom of the funnel carried a lot of business value, but the experience had become fragmented. Cart and checkout sat at the intersection of product discovery, payments, promotions, retailer operations, fulfillment constraints, and user trust. That made the surface difficult to improve through isolated UI changes alone.
The opportunity was to step back and define the system: what users needed at this stage, where the experience was creating friction, and how design could help the business make more disciplined decisions.
The brief
What was asked for
A visual refresh of the cart experience and a set of conversion-focused experiment ideas.
What it actually was
A clearer point of view on what cart and checkout were responsible for. Before the team could prioritize screens, experiments, or roadmap ideas, we needed a shared framework for evaluating the surface. Without that, improvements risked becoming disconnected optimizations: useful in isolation, but not strong enough to change the overall funnel experience.
Constraints
Every project has the constraints you negotiate and the ones you live inside. The ones that shaped this work:
- The surface touched multiple parts of the business, including discovery, payments, promotions, fulfillment, and retailer operations.
- Many user-facing issues were downstream symptoms of deeper system constraints.
- Every change carried conversion risk because users at this stage had already shown high purchase intent.
- The experience needed to support both first-time confidence and repeat-user speed.
- Design decisions had to be clear enough for cross-functional teams to align around, not just visually polished.
Decisions
Reframe the problem before redesigning the interface
The initial ask pointed toward page-level improvements. I pushed the work upstream by reframing cart and checkout as a decision system rather than a single screen. That shifted the conversation from "What should this page look like?" to "What does this surface need to help users understand, recover, trust, and complete?" This framing helped separate cosmetic improvements from structural ones.
Define lenses for evaluating the experience
I introduced three lenses for assessing bottom-funnel work: Intent recovery — Does the experience help users return to what they were trying to do? Comprehension — Does the user understand what they are buying, what changed, and why the total looks the way it does? Momentum — Does the experience preserve decisions the user has already made instead of asking them to restart, reselect, or re-evaluate unnecessarily? These lenses gave the team a shared language for evaluating ideas across cart, checkout, reorder, promotions, payment, and fulfillment-related flows.
Sequence the roadmap around confidence and leverage
The most visible ideas were not necessarily the best first moves. Some concepts required heavier system work, more operational dependencies, or broader alignment before they could responsibly ship. I helped sequence the work so the team could start with lower-risk, higher-confidence improvements while preserving space for more ambitious future patterns. The principle was simple: ship the work that builds confidence first, then use that confidence to unlock the harder system changes.
Tradeoffs
- Speed vs. certainty — chose high-confidence improvements that respected operational complexity over moving fast by oversimplifying the underlying constraints.
- Vision vs. sequence — chose a visible future-facing direction over prioritizing only what could ship immediately.
- Conversion vs. trust — chose reducing friction while keeping necessary information visible over hiding details to streamline the flow.
- Interface polish vs. system clarity — chose clarifying the role of the surface first over polishing the ui before the system was understood.
Working with the room
The hardest part of the project was not the interface. It was alignment. Cart and checkout exposed competing priorities across growth, marketplace operations, fulfillment, payments, and retailer needs. I used writing, frameworks, and structured design critique to make the problem easier for cross-functional partners to reason about. Instead of relying on mockups alone, I created shared language that helped teams discuss the work in terms of user intent, system constraints, and business impact.
Outcome
The work gave the team a clearer mandate for bottom-funnel design and a more disciplined way to prioritize improvements across cart and checkout. It helped shift the surface from a maintenance area into a strategic growth system, with a clearer framework for evaluating conversion opportunities, user comprehension, repeat-purchase behavior, and future platform patterns.
In hindsight
The most valuable part of this project was not a single screen. It was clarifying the role of a complex surface well enough that future work could move with less ambiguity. That is where design had the most leverage: not by simplifying the complexity away, but by making it easier for the organization to act on.
Next case study →
Aligning a fragmented delivery experience across three surfaces
Weedmaps · Regulated marketplace · Multi-surface redesign