Designing a Better Autoship Experience
A case study in rethinking Vitacost’s Autoship journey across on-site education, cart and checkout UX, backend-aware functionality, and supporting marketing touchpoints.
This project is one example of the broader digital experience work I led across Vitacost’s site and customer journey.
Role: UX Strategy, Creative Direction, Visual Design, Cross-Functional Product Leadership
Scope: Marketing Page, Cart Experience, Checkout Flow, Backend Coordination, Campaign Support
Platform: Vitacost eCommerce
Focus: Subscription / recurring order experience
Why Autoship Mattered
Autoship sat at the intersection of convenience, retention, and customer trust. It had clear business value, but the experience around it needed to do more than just exist. Customers had to understand it, feel comfortable opting in, and move through the flow without friction or confusion.
That meant the work was not limited to one screen or one feature. The experience had to make sense from first introduction through enrollment, cart behavior, and checkout.
The Old Experience
The existing Autoship experience (then referred to as Set&Save) had the kind of fragmentation that happens when a useful feature grows without a fully unified customer journey around it. While the Set&Save brand was strong enough, the experience lacked polish across touchpoints and the front-end flow did not fully match the importance of the feature itself. Additionally, there were critical friction points throughout the experience leading to low utilization of the feature.
A Full-Journey Scope
Autoship is a good example of the kind of work I regularly led at Vitacost. I wasn’t just designing screens. I was helping define the experience, connect teams around it, and carry it through UX, product thinking, implementation, site experience, brand, and marketing.
UX/UI
Autoship touched a full customer journey, from first introduction through cart and checkout. I helped shape the flow around clarity, ease, and reducing friction — the same kind of UX thinking I regularly brought to digital work across Vitacost.
Product Leadership
This work needed more than design direction. It needed someone helping define scope, align teams, and keep the project moving. On Autoship, that meant shaping the work from end to end in a way that looked a lot closer to product ownership than traditional art direction.
Implementation
The experience had to work inside real system constraints, so design decisions could not be separated from implementation. I worked closely with technical partners to make sure the final solution held up in practice, not just in concept.
Site Experience
Autoship had to fit naturally into the larger shopping experience, from educational pages to cart behavior and overall flow. More broadly, I regularly helped shape site experience at Vitacost across navigation, merchandising, seasonal takeovers, and promotional spaces.
Branding
A big part of the challenge was making Autoship feel like a natural extension of the Vitacost brand instead of a disconnected utility. That meant aligning the feature with the broader visual language, hierarchy, and tone of the site.
Marketing
Autoship needed support beyond the flow itself. Messaging, on-site promotion, and surrounding creative all helped customers understand the value of the program and feel more comfortable engaging with it. That kind of full-funnel thinking was a regular part of my role.
Wireframing the Experience
The work started with structure. Before refining visuals, I focused on clarifying the flow, identifying friction points, and thinking through how customers would actually encounter and understand the program. Wireframing helped turn a loosely connected feature set into a clearer journey, one that could better balance explanation, utility, and conversion.
This was also where product thinking became essential. Good UX in this kind of flow is not just about cleaner screens. It comes from understanding what the business needs, what the customer needs, and where technical constraints are likely to shape the final experience.
Technical Considerations
The final experience had to work within real backend requirements, not just ideal front-end concepts. That meant close collaboration around how Autoship logic, cart behavior, and checkout updates would actually function. The design process was shaped by those realities from the beginning, which helped keep the work grounded and made implementation smoother.
Bringing the Brand to the Experience
Once the structure was working, the visual design helped bring the feature into closer alignment with the broader Vitacost brand. The goal was to make Autoship feel less like an isolated utility and more like a natural part of the overall customer experience. That meant clearer hierarchy, stronger visual consistency, and a design language that made the feature feel easier, more trustworthy, and more integrated.
Supporting Adoption Through Marketing
Because Autoship was both a feature and a behavioral shift, the rollout also needed marketing support. On-site messaging and supporting creative helped communicate the value of the program more clearly and reinforce the experience beyond the core flow itself. The goal was to build familiarity, not just functionality.
Outcome
The result was a more cohesive Autoship experience across education, enrollment, cart, and checkout — one that better reflected both the value of the program and the standards of the broader site experience. It brought more clarity to the customer journey, created stronger alignment across touchpoints, and treated the feature like a real product experience instead of a loose collection of parts.
Project Credits
While I led the charge, this work was collaborative. I want to recognize the designers, photographers, and creative partners whose contributions helped bring different parts of the brand to life.
