— PROJECT NAME
Return Policy Enhancements
— ROLE
User Research
Design
The Problem: The Return Policy settings at Loop are absolutely mission-critical—they power how our merchants control shipping destinations, carrier usage, and other complex logistics rules. The big issue? Merchants usually set up this policy once during onboarding and then rarely look back. When they do need to make changes, they were faced with a giant, disorganized list of settings, making it nearly impossible to quickly spot the differences between policies. This chaos led to a lot of unnecessary support tickets.
My Approach: As the product designer on the shipping team, my main goal was simple: make it much easier for merchants to handle these issues themselves and cut down on support tickets. Since the policy settings were a core source of pain, we took on a major redesign, guided by one of our key tenets: Always leave it better than we found it.
The Solution: I led the complete overhaul of the Return Policy interface. This involved re-architecting the entire flow and information hierarchy, making sure policies were easy to compare, and streamlining all the setup steps. We successfully transformed this complicated, overlooked system into an intuitive, manageable product where merchants feel fully in control of their shipping logic.
PREVIOUS UI
A long list in no particular order
USER RESEARCH + DISCOVERY
Merchant pain points
Our onboarding team is a critical resource across the entire product journey. We immediately engaged them early in the process to uncover merchant pain points, quickly identifying several recurring and impactful themes through interviews.
THEMES
The onboarding module is supposed to make the return policy setup easier but onboarding often advises to verify setup.
The return policy main page is an opportunity to show the merchant valuable information at a glance without having to open the individual return policy.
When merchants have to edit their return policy, merchants find it difficult to find the correct settings.
Shipping settings are complicated and Loop’s paradigm of using shipping providers isn’t intuitive. Merchants understand relationships with carriers (FedEx, USPS, UPS, etc.) better.
Merchant user flows with onboarding feedback led to key UI improvements.
UX HIGLIGHTS
Return policy homepage
We focused the homepage on clarity and action, simplifying the UI to display only essential information while making the “Edit” function more prominent. We strategically included key data points (carriers, Returning from, and Returning to) to ensure users could get a full glance of the policy details without having to open it, which simultaneously supported internal efficiency and faster issue resolution.
Section tabs and grouping
We restructured the policy settings into a tabbed UI, grouping content into logical sections that both guide the merchant and clearly indicate setup prioritization. This design change aims to help merchants get their policies right the first time, significantly reducing the need for future administrative revisits.
Shipping updates
Following platform changes to carrier management, we implemented necessary UI updates, seizing the opportunity to refine the shipping section by removing outdated provider references and prioritizing carrier focus and selection for better merchant control.
