Redesigned Cox's entire purchasing journey for 6.5M customers within heavy system and business constraints. Streamlined the flow and increased Mobile Wireless orders by 55.6%.

UX/UI: Xiaoyu Liu (Me)
Brand & visual: Leigh Watson, Zoe Wang
Creative direction: Hadley Allen
Product management: Abby Reimer, Rachel Schwartz
Project management: Dani Whitlock, Zoe Sherlock
Content strategy: June Tsang
Research: María Swart
Analytics: James Cherry
Engineering: Cox Digital Team

Client: Cox
Status: Launched
Timeline: Jun 2023 - Dec 2024

The problem

Cox launched mobile services on top of an existing home services business and built a separate purchase flow for each. Customers who wanted both had to buy them in sequence, through two completely different experiences, with two separate carts. 78.2% abandoned before checkout. 54.1% of new customers never completed orders.

The business knew conversion was broken. But the dominant assumption was that this was a technical constraint, something to work around. The flows were separate because the products were separate. That framing was the real problem.

My role
Sr UX Designer at Huge, working with Cox as client. I led design across the full purchase experience from discovery through shipped product, collaborating with Cox's digital team across UX, marketing, product, and engineering. Achieved the highest client satisfaction scores at Huge.

The scope
This project touched every part of Cox's digital experience — AEM design system, global navigation, homepage, product pages, configuration, cart, checkout, order confirmation.

The core shift
The fragmented flows weren't a technical inevitability. They were a product of Cox's internal org structure leaking into the customer experience. Customers don't think about "home services" and "mobile" as separate purchases. They think about getting connected.

The solution wasn't to optimize two flows. It was to consolidate them into one unified cart that reflected how customers actually shop.

This was a harder sell than it sounds. A unified cart meant rethinking business logic, pricing display, and checkout for every scenario across two product lines simultaneously.

Discovery

Audited existing buy flows across user paths, analytics, and competitive benchmarks. Ran qualitative sessions with UX researcher to understand where and why customers were dropping off. The data confirmed what users already knew: the two-cart system made no sense to anyone who wasn't inside Cox.

Design foundation

Distilled findings into three design principles — Simple, Informative, Easy to Use — as shared guardrails for every decision across a large cross-functional team.

Experience architecture

Mapped core flows for new and existing customers across every scenario: new customer buying internet only, new customer buying internet and mobile together, existing customer adding mobile, and more. Defined what was feasible for initial release and what to push for later.

The full journey

Redesigned the experience end to end across six stages

Discover — highlighted key buy flow entry points in the global nav and revamped marketing pages.

Browse — introduced product detail pages optimized for scalability and commerce integration.

Configure — improved the flow by keeping users informed and minimizing redundant inputs.

Review — established a unified shopping cart that balances user expectations with technical priorities.

Checkout — optimized nested steps and simplified information handling.

Confirm — emphasized excitement, clarity, and actionability.

Happy path prototype
Built a functional prototype covering the full new customer purchase journey for Internet and Mobile together, used for client alignment and usability testing.

The consolidated cart

The centerpiece of the redesign

Before: two separate carts, each only aware of its own products.

After: one unified cart showing both internet and mobile services together, with transparent cost breakdowns, cross-sell and upsell opportunities surfaced contextually, and a single checkout flow.

Key design decisions

Two-column layout to align with users' mental model and make price comparison easier.
Clear product and billing details to build confidence before checkout.
Progressive disclosure via service cards to surface the right amount of information without overload.

New component for the AEM design system
5 service and bundle types
10+ states and edge cases
All breakpoints

Usability testing
18 moderated sessions between iterations. No high-severity findings. Medium findings concentrated on pricing transparency. Updated cost summary labels and CTA copy to address this directly.

Handoff
Delivered beyond dev-ready: 6+ user flows, 5 functional prototypes, 15 components with 150+ variants, fully annotated. The comprehensiveness eliminated rework and let engineering move faster.

Outcome

Phase 1 consolidated fragmented buy flows into one unified flow, achieving 55.6% increase in Mobile order conversion after marketing page redesign.

The phased approach balanced immediate wins (high-impact fixes) with long-term scalability, positioning Cox for continued optimization. Comprehensive documentation eliminated engineering rework and enabled faster implementation.

Stakeholder feedback was positive, with one noting that our approach pushed beyond comfort zones and helped simplify upcoming scenarios, particularly involving Mobile, aligning future checkout consolidation efforts.

Client testimonial

“I appreciate you continuing to push us (and our expectations) out of comfort zone. Now you can say ‘told you so’. The concept of a target state cart has been a paradigm for quite some time, driven mostly by business rules. With your proposed approach we simplify a number of scenarios for current customers and solve a number of upcoming use cases particularly with Mobile. I believe it will also put us on an easier path towards consolidation of checkout.”

- Luke Whiteman, Director of UX Design at Cox

Reflection

The biggest constraint on this project wasn't technical. It was organizational. Cox's two-cart system existed because two teams owned two products. Changing that required convincing stakeholders to accept short-term complexity for long-term clarity.

The most impactful design work often starts before any wireframe. It starts with reframing what the problem actually is.

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