The Home Depot / Order Up Price Adjustments
A routine discount.
An unnecessary restart.
Associates printed a receipt, aborted the order, and rebuilt it in another app just to apply a markdown.
I designed an Order Up workflow that kept the order visible while associates made pricing decisions and explained the calculation to customers.
- My contribution
- Staff UX Designer; 12-store discovery, interaction design, prototypes, and usability testing
- Constraints
- Manager approval above $50, a store satisfaction budget, and SKU allocation
- Delivery
- 50-store pilot, followed by chain-wide rollout
Keep the item visible
when attention moves away.
Competitor matches and damaged-item discounts were routine requests. Order Up lacked a consistent path, and its reason codes did not cover the situations associates encountered.
Observation and interviews across 12 stores exposed the workaround: print a receipt, abort the order, open another app, scan the receipt to repopulate it, then apply the discount and finish checkout. Managers trusted associates to make good calls; the interface needed to support that judgment.
I prototyped modals, fly-outs, inline inputs, and separate pages, then took options to stores to test with associates. The important constraint was interruption: associates left the order for another app or a phone call and needed to recover their place.
Modals and some fly-outs covered the item being adjusted. Testing favored an anchored fly-out that preserved context. I also replaced “adjustment” with “markdown,” the term associates already knew.
The form should sit beside the item, with enough order context to return to the task and explain the math.
See the observed workaround
Associate flexibility
still needed business boundaries.
Store operations required manager approval for markdowns above $50, a store satisfaction budget, and allocation across SKUs for whole-order markdowns. Those rules shaped the interaction alongside associate needs.
I developed item-level and whole-order apply, update, and remove paths. The order retained the original price, discount, and updated total. Markdowns above $50 handed off to the existing manager-approval workflow.
Keep the calculation
beside the conversation.
Interactive reconstruction · sample data · item-level markdowns
Try a markdown without leaving the order
Open the light bulb’s more menu to apply a markdown, then update or remove it.
Inspect the static apply-markdown design
What changed
From pilot
to chain-wide rollout.
After a 50-store pilot, the markdown feature rolled out to all Home Depot stores. The project presentation reports directional trends at 30, 60, and 90 days after launch: lower transaction times, reduced shrink, stronger adoption of standard procedures, and associates feeling more empowered.
What I took forward
Preserving context and using the associate’s language made business controls easier to work within. Flexibility and approval requirements belonged in the same workflow.