Purchasing Permissions

Simplifying remote purchasing for Home Depot Pro customers

I redesigned the Remote Purchase enrollment experience to help professional customers discover, understand, and manage their remote purchasing options without relying on phone support.

Role: UX Designer
Team: Product · Engineering · Business
Platform: Mobile Web
Status: Designed, not shipped

The problem

Remote purchasing was slower than it needed to be.

Phone-based sales averaged 7 minutes and accounted for 82% of remote transactions.

Research and existing product data revealed that many Pro customers believed Phone Authorization was the only way to make a remote purchase. Other options were difficult to discover, understand, and manage.

This created an opportunity to make remote purchasing more accessible through self-service.

Research & insights

I combined customer research, usability testing, and existing product data to understand why customers weren’t using the available self-service options.

Three themes emerged:

Customers wanted more control.
They expected to be able to view and manage their purchasing settings themselves.

The options weren’t clear.
Customers didn’t always understand the differences between Phone Authorization, Text2Confirm, and other available methods.

Enrollment was difficult to discover.
Customers had little reason to know where Remote Purchase enrollment lived.

The opportunity

Instead of asking customers to find a separate enrollment experience, I looked for a natural point within an existing workflow where Remote Purchase could be introduced.

Key design decisions

01 — Embed enrollment in add credit card

[Add Credit Card / enrollment image]

I integrated Remote Purchase enrollment into the Add Credit Card flow rather than creating another destination for customers to discover.

Because customers were already adding a payment method, this created a natural opportunity to introduce how that payment method could be used for remote purchases.

02 — Surface remote purchase options together

[Remote Purchase options image]

Customers needed to understand their choices before selecting a method.

I brought the available Remote Purchase options together and clarified how they differed, shifting the experience from simply choosing a method to understanding the options and then choosing one.

03 — Make management self-service

[Cards & Accounts image]

Enrollment wasn’t enough. Customers also needed to see their current Remote Purchase settings and change them later.

I redesigned the Cards & Accounts experience to make Remote Purchase status visible and provide a clear path for managing those settings.

Iteration & collaboration

[Iteration / before-and-after images]

I worked closely with product and engineering throughout the process to balance customer needs with technical and business constraints.

Research gave me evidence to advocate for changes when proposed solutions didn’t address the underlying usability problem, while early collaboration helped ensure the final direction was practical to implement.

Final experience

Discover → understand → manage

[Final experience image / flow]

The final experience connected three previously fragmented moments:

Discover available Remote Purchase options within an existing workflow.

Understand the differences between available methods.

Manage enrollment and settings through the customer’s account.

Together, these changes created a more intuitive path to self-service remote purchasing.

Outcome

A validated path toward self-service

The project was ultimately deprioritized before implementation as business priorities shifted.

Before that decision, the experience had been researched with customers, iterated with product and engineering, and documented with a clear rationale for implementation.

The work resulted in:

A validated remote purchase enrollment experience
A clearer way to compare purchasing options
A self-service approach to managing remote purchase settings
Alignment across product, design, and engineering

What I learned

The biggest opportunity wasn’t the enrollment flow itself. It was the moment surrounding it.

Customers didn’t necessarily need another destination. They needed the right information at the moment they were already making a related decision.

That insight shifted my approach from designing a better enrollment experience to designing enrollment into an existing customer workflow.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Role: Sole designer
Team: Product · Engineering · Business
Platform: Mobile web
Status: Designed, not shipped

Project brief

Role: Sole designer
Team: UX · Product · Engineering
Platform: Mobile web, desktop

This project was part of a multi-year enterprise initiative focused on reducing risk through research, user validation, and cross-functional alignment. The work established a well-validated solution and clear path toward future implementation. Home Depot Pro’s remote checkout experience was fragmented and slow, creating friction for professional buyers who relied on it daily. The goal was to update the add credit card flow to seamlessly include remote purchase enrollment — and in doing so, increase awareness of and clarify the differences between the available remote purchase options.

The challenge

Remote checkout at Home Depot Pro was slow and fragmented. Phone-based sales took an average of 7 minutes — and that accounted for 82% of transactions. Pros had little visibility into which remote purchase options they were enrolled in, and changing those settings was cumbersome enough that most didn’t bother.

The deeper issue: many pros believed phone authorization was the only remote checkout option available. They couldn’t explain the differences between options, and as a result, faster and safer alternatives like Text2Confirm went largely unused. Low adoption wasn’t a preference problem — it was an awareness and access problem.

Approach

User research surfaced three consistent findings: pros wanted more self-service control over their account settings, most were unaware that alternatives to phone authorization existed, and remote purchase options overall were used at low rates — not because pros didn’t need them, but because the path to enrollment was buried.

The solution was to meet pros where they already were: the add credit card flow. By integrating remote purchase enrollment directly into that flow, we created a natural moment to introduce all available options, explain the differences, and guide pros toward faster methods. The enrollment step wasn’t optional — it was built into the flow, which meant every pro adding a card would leave with an active remote purchase setup.

Throughout the process, I worked closely with the PM and engineering team — pressure-testing decisions early, aligning on technical constraints, and making sure the solution was buildable without requiring major backend changes. That collaboration shaped several key design calls.

Key decisions

Embed enrollment in the add credit card flow

Rather than building a standalone enrollment screen, we integrated it directly into an existing high-traffic flow. This reduced the need for pros to seek out settings they didn’t know existed, and ensured enrollment happened at a natural, relevant moment.

Surface all remote purchase options side by side

Presenting options in a clear, comparable format addressed the root cause of low Text2Confirm adoption — pros simply didn’t know it existed or what it offered. Making the comparison explicit let the design do the education work instead of relying on reps to explain it.

Design for self-service from the start

The updated Cards & Accounts screen gave pros direct visibility into their current remote purchase enrollment — and a clear path to modify it. Reducing dependence on phone support was both a user need and a business goal.

Outcome

The project was deprioritized before shipping — a business decision unrelated to the design. What the work did produce was a validated, well-documented solution ready to be picked back up: a clear flow, an aligned team, and a design rationale grounded in real user research.

The research findings alone — particularly the gap between what pros believed was available and what actually existed — gave the product team concrete evidence to bring to future prioritization conversations. That kind of groundwork tends to matter more than it looks like in the moment.