Project Overview
The Task:
With Shopee's current initiatives on its mobile app, propose a solution that focuses on (i) improving an existing feature OR (ii) creating a new feature that would enable Shopee to remain the leading e-commerce platform in your chosen market. The solution should be designed with respect to respective markets and the local consumer behaviour.
The Theme
'Engaging the 2021 Local Consumer'
Project Start
For this challenge, we had 2 choices:
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Propose an entirely new feature for the Shopee mobile app
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Propose a change for an existing Shopee mobile app feature
We decided to go with option 2 based on our survey answers and how much time we had on hand. We went with a goal-oriented design approach which helped us focus on higher priority tasks. We felt that qualitative research was most helpful. We conducted a survey, competitor audit, usability tests, crafted the personas based on results, created and tested wireframes and prototypes of the project. We started by identifying questions for our survey:
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"What are users mainly doing while on the app?"
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"What issues are our users currently facing while using the app?"
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"Do users find any features redundant?"
Survey
From the results of our survey, we noticed that our users rarely used the 'Feed' feature and the majority of them stated that the reason why they do not use it is because:
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It served no value or nothing attracts them to visit the page
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Their main goal was to buy a product from the store
Competitor Analysis
We took a look at 1 of Shopee's competitors, Lazada and how they designed their Feed page, as well as Instagram whose main page is the Feed page as well.
We wanted to understand what makes users want to view Feed pages and how developers and designers make use of this feature to gain user count.
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The difference that we notice Feed page between Instagram's app compared to Shopee's and Lazada's app is that:
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Users on Instagram almost all the time, are viewing posts of people whom they have followed
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​This tells us that users would be more inclined to visit their Feed page because they wanted to stay up to date with new posts from other users that they have followed​​​​
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However, Shopee's and Lazada's Feed pages mostly display posts of products that may be random and not of interest to every user
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Thus, we wanted to work on improving how this Feed page would work in the Shopee app and make use of it to attract users to viewers to take a look at them when they use the app, by changing what kind of content is displayed for each user.
Lazada
Customer Journey Map
We also crafted a customer journey map to understand how our users interacted with the Shopee mobile app and how they felt at different points of their interaction in general. This further shows us that users rarely visit the Feed page as there is nothing that attracts them to go to that page.
Design Goals
Our main design goal was to redesign the Feed page and think of how we can improve traffic to the page.
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There were a few changes that we felt if implemented, would help us attain our goal:
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On the 'Timeline' tab, our idea was to create a page where users would get to view listings from shops or other users they have followed​​
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This was to create a page similar to what Instagram did so that users would be able to easily view any updated listings from shops or people of interests that they had followed​
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We also wanted to display the usernames of other users who recently bought the item to attract our user to view the listing if it is of their interest
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Adding more category tabs under the 'Explore' tab for users to navigate through the Feed easily
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The aim for this was to help users sort out listings that were of more interest to them​​
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Proposed Idea:
With our changes in mind, we recreated and reorganized the layout of the Shopee Feed page and ended up with our prototype below.
Lesson Learnt
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Try to ask more open-ended questions so that our users can give more opinions with bias or even suggest a new feature that they would like to see
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If time permits, conduct user tests and usability testing to get better results from our target group
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Dare to design something new if there is time as it may be an innovative idea brought to life