Shopee: Rethinking The UX Design

Submitted to: Shopee

Brief: UX Design Test

Date: 13 June 2021

(01) IDENTIFY

Shopee is a multinational technology company that focuses on e-commerce platform. Offering products ranging from electronics, health, and beauty to fashion products and more, its target market expanded rapidly from Singapore to Southeast Asia, including Taiwan. As the main tool of market penetration is their mobile app, the Shopee platform presents itself as the fundamental approach to gaining customer.

Shopee identifies itself as a regulator than an executor, with as little interference in the interaction between the buyer and seller. Shopee aims to develop a platform based around the customer through the use of creating a better customer service experience, also known as Customer Obsession, a state of hyperfocus on ensuring a customer-first approach. Every aspect from sales to marketing is built around this idea.

(02) DESIGN PROCESS: THE 4Ds

What I am trying to achieve is to help improve the overall user experience for Shopee buyers. Employing the Double Diamond design process model developed by the British Design Council, I aim to kickstart the process by breaking down each of the components within the diagram –

Main Market Competitor:

This chart provides the ranking for the top most visited e-commerce platforms in the year 2020. We can see that Shopee has accumulated the most number of users, topping the chart as the most used application, with Lazada tailing close in the second place with a difference of 144,230,659 users. This will result in me using Lazada as Shopee’s main competitor in the e-commerce market.

NIELSEN & MOLICH’S DESIGN GUIDE

There are many rules and guiding principles when it comes to User Interface Design, and this particular one was taught during a UI/UX module in school: Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics. In this study, I will be accessing the Shopee’s interface design and its issues using the listed principles as a guide.

KEY FINDINGS FROM USER RESEARCH

I then proceeded to interview 4 frequent patronizers (age between 25 to 56 years old) of Shopee’s platform to find out some insights and personal experiences from their prior purchases. Here are some of the main comments made:

Question: What are some of the pains points you encounter while using the app? Any other thoughts or improvement you wish to see?

Feedbacks:

0 1 ) ”The Homepage appears too messy, a lot of unknown categories and I don’t use/visit more than 75% of them”

0 2 ) “I rarely browse the Homepage, most of the time, I go straight to the search bar to look for what I want”

0 3 ) “I always click on unnecessary buttons by accident, for example, the SPIN & WIN button located on the bottom right side of the Homepage”

0 4 ) “The reviews on the products are not very helpful, it makes me have less trust in the seller”

0 5 ) “I am a man and my flash deals are very tailored towards females products only, and most times, I have to end up searching through a sea of products via the search function, I wish it was more personalized”

(03) PERSONAS & AFFINITY MAPPING

Persona 01:

Persona 02:

AFFINITY MAPPING:

After consolidating the profiles’ experiences above and identifying their pain points, I managed to conclude some of the key issues they faced on the app:

Where:
0 1 ) Homepage
0 2 ) Product Page

What:
0 1 ) Search Bar Is The Most Used Function On The Shopee App Platform.
0 2 ) Product Page Reviews Are Not Helpful.
0 3 ) Products Are Not Customised To User’s Profile/Demographic.

Why:
0 1 ) Homepage Is Too Cluttered With Repeated Information.
0 2 ) Reviews Are Not Sorted Out Well In Order Of Usefulness.

How:
0 1 ) To Declutter And Reorganise The Sections On Homepage For Better
User Experience.
0 2 ) Create An Optimised Experience For The Users According To Their Past Searches Or Past Purchases

(04) MODIFIED LAYOUT

Homepage –

I interviewed 4 Shopee users, and from the feedback I received, one of the most repeated issues is the cluttered homepage alongside buttons that don’t interest them.

What Changed:

1. To create a more personalized experience, in the redesigned layout, the user is now allowed to toggle between “Your Categories” and “Popular”. Popular contains the default icons while within Your Categories contains more customized buttons such as “Favourites” and more gender-centric categories tailored to a specific user. These icons will be generated based on the products they browsed.

2. Decluttered layout and removed repeated elements, implemented a consistent user interface.

What Changed:

1. Implement a “Your Likes” button so that users can quickly look through the coupons they saved beforehand, with one-click access to their favorite items.

What Changed:

1. Once users clicked into any of the categories, they are also allowed to navigate between “Deals Near me” and the other icons. Before that, the placements of icons within the page appear too overwhelming and users feel intimidated to explore.

With this system implemented, users can easily explore between the different categories with 1 click.

What Changed:

1. Prioritizing “Selection of Variation” over shipping details.

2. Sorting Users’ Feedbacks via a rating system so that people can get the most accurate of reviews. Users who find any comments to be helpful can simply give it a thumbs up so that quality reviews can be sorted to help users with their decision-making.

As 3/4 of the users mentioned that the reviews are generally not useful and the images are often uploaded randomly, resulting in questionable reviews, to address the feedbacks also means to empathize with the users in order to integrate a clearer sorting system that filters out the highest rated comment. Altogether, this would help in user retention and drive sales.

Final Conclusion:

This concludes my very first experience in re-designing an e-commerce platform! It has always seemed intimidating to redesign e-commerce platform due to their complex nature but through this research and thinking phase, it makes me realize how every aspect has to be thoroughly thought through to maximize user’s engagement, and every decision made has to help improve User’s experience on the app. It has truly been a fun and interesting experience for me, to say the least. I hope to have the opportunity to work on more pages in the near future!

Prototype Link Below:

View the infographic version here.