We consolidated Wayfair’s three “Report A Problem” workflows into a single, streamlined experience for customers and agents—enhancing consistency, reducing cognitive load, and improving both agent efficiency and customer satisfaction. The redesign, rolled out in two phases, introduced conversational copy and aligned customer and agent experiences for a more intuitive resolution process.

As the design lead, I defined the detailed vision for the updated agent and customer experience that encompassed 11 workflows while also overseeing the work of two designers who helped with the validation and final design delivery processes. My responsibilities included:

Conducting ethnographic and evaluative user research

Current state analysis

Iterative usability testing and design

Crafting low and high-fidelity designs

Content design

Collaborating with partners across Product, Engineering, Design, and Operations

Wayfair, a leading online home retailer, serves 22.6M customers with over 33M products. Its post-purchase experience includes returns and issue resolution, but the Report A Problem workflow caused friction across self-service, virtual assistants, and live support. With agents navigating multiple wizards and customers facing a disjointed self-service flow, the experience needed a more intuitive, streamlined solution.

👎 Customers have an inconsistent and suboptimal experience across channels.

😵‍💫 Having too many wizards adds mental burden, preventing agents from efficiently resolving incidents.

Given the scope of this project, we had to spend time breaking down the current state to understand what the underlying problem was in the experience. Overall the discovery consisted of the following tasks and deliverables:

Many customers prefer talking to a real person about incidents, resulting in a high cost-to-service. Customers feel like they’ll get more concrete resolutions for their issues by talking to a live person, resulting in more trust and confidence that their issue will be resolved appropriately.

Once we had clarity into the core issue, we were able to start defining our approach. We knew that the new technology we were moving to would have a significant impact on our design and create some limitations, but we didn't want that to limit us from creating a viable user experience.

We reimagined the Report a Problem experience as a unified workflow for both customers and agents—ensuring consistency, reducing friction, and streamlining resolution paths.

A single workflow for all users: We designed a core workflow that applies to both self-service and agent tools, maintaining the same step-by-step structure with tailored functionality where needed.

For agents: We consolidated entry points, aligned self-service and wizard steps, and introduced human-centric copy to reduce cognitive load.

For customers: We prioritized incident-first resolution, broke steps into smaller, focused interactions, and refined the flow for more intuitive decision-making.

⏱️ Minimize wait time – Prevent agents from switching between wizards and waiting for them to load.

💥 Reduce extra noise – Eliminate unnecessary steps and questions to streamline the process.

🎨 Lean into reusability – Maintain a unified layout across workflows to reduce cognitive load.

🗣 Use a customer-centric voice and tone – Make diagnosis questions feel more natural and intuitive.

In 2022 the new Report a Problem workflow experience launched globally to 5,000+ service agents and 100% of customer traffic across North America and Europe 🎉

Reduction in Handle Time Globally: Reduced cognitive burden on deciding which wizard to run resulted in ~7s reduction in average handle time

More interactive tones and alignment with Self Service flows created more guidance in agents’ conversations.