Order History - New Micro Front End (Architecture Theme)

Created by Marco Morales (Deactivated)
May 15, 2019
3 min read

TL;DR: We updated the Order History page as part of the effort to make our platform easier to update. This specific project we hope will accelerate future commerce page improvements, and it also shows early data in support of the faster development timelines we expect to see from this replatforming initiative! Order History took ~1.5 full development team weeks from start to finish, an improvement over the initial projects we have tracked as a team.

 

Release date: April 26th, 2019

Product owner: @Marco Morales (Deactivated)

What is it?
We updated the Order History page, which lets learners see their ecommerce purchases. You can view your purchases here: https://orders.edx.org/orders. From this page you can also get to your receipts. Below you can see the mobile view of the new Orders page, which renders as a table in the desktop case.

 


Key talking points for customers:
Why work on this page?

This page is one of the initial pages in the learner experience that we have targeted to be converted over to a micro front end. This also lets us work toward marking the older account settings area (which used to contain the order history page) as deprecated.

Why do I see so many purchases, I didn’t make all those purchases?

For a while we would count all enrollments as ecommerce transactions and generated a receipt. We have not yet cleaned up or removed these entries, but we have created a ticket to track this effort. Most learners today will only see orders for their purchases.

Who will notice the change, and where (LMS/Studio)?
Learners will now see Order History in the account dropdown menu on the top right of the learner experience pages.

What impact will it have on learners? On course teams?

This page should load more quickly and be more visible to learners now in the account dropdown. Otherwise the experience is very similar.

 

Results: Our investments into development infrastructure (aka “runways”) are intended to speed up delivery timelines for teams across edX. One way to measure this is to look at the how many development team weeks it takes to deliver an initiative from start to finish.

  • Learner Profile - 4.5 full development team weeks - Our first rebuilt page,

  • Account Settings - 2.5 (projected) full development team weeks - In progress currently, but we believe a project of higher technical complexity than Learner Profile, delivered in less time.

  • Order History - 1.5 full development team weeks - A bit simpler than the first two, but getting to delivery timelines that are exciting to see, and that we hope to repeat with other projects soon!

This data is directional and something we expect to continue to monitor (in addition to performance & page views, etc). The measurement of performance, page views, etc was a bit harder to achieve on this page as the original Order History page was a sub-view of the Account Settings page previously. Look forward to more charts and visuals for gains in future efforts as we work on our Performance Observability infrastructure!

Longer Results Explanation:

  • Because our team works on a few initiatives at once, each took longer from a calendar weeks perspective than from the development team time perspective. We calculated our development team time by assuming a hypothetical (and not realistic) 100% focus on this 1 effort using our team’s estimated velocity. Calendar week time for the three projects above was 9 weeks, 7 weeks, 5 weeks, in the order presented above.

  • This number isn’t always achievable, as sometimes certain discovery efforts must be completed before other efforts start, but we still want to see this number go down as much as possible.

  • Finally, this calculation is a rough single-team (Arch Squad) measure based on many assumptions and ways of working specific to us, so it can’t be applied to other teams directly.

 

Credits: Thanks to the Architecture Squad / aka #ArchSquid - @Robert Raposa , @Nimisha Asthagiri (Deactivated) , @Douglas Hall (Deactivated) , @Adam Butterworth (Deactivated) , @Albemarle (Deactivated) , @David Joy (Deactivated) , and @Darren Domingos (Deactivated) .