shopee

re-design excercise for the most popular online shopping app in southeast Asia

UX Research/ Design | 3 days

Approach

To better understand existing user pain points, I briefly conduct 16 interviews with Shopee users to locate the liked, wished and most importantly – what they didn’t like about the app. The users I asked included 12 Vietnamese women and 4 men in their early to late twenties. They have used the app within the last 3 months. Due to lack of connections with users from other country, I’ll be focusing on finding the UX specifically to Shopee App in Vietnam and from the perspective of buyers since I wasn’t able to get in contact with any seller.

Concept Development

Through these feedbacks, it was a clear consensus that users were weary of the good authenticity on Shopee. However, I understand that 16 is not yet statistically significant so I went on Google and searched for Shopee reviews. The first search term I used was “Ưu và nhược điểm của Shopee” (Translated: Theadvantages and disadvantages of Shopee). To focus on redesign, I will only display the disadvantagesfindings. I looked through 3 pages of google search results, filtering out identical articles or articles written for online seller; here are the categorize results (Sources are at the end):

Reasons

Count

No clear policy for sellers cancelling orders

Sellers are unreliable (goods’ quality, order processing speed, insurance on goods):

Difficult to buy during sale time: 1

No insurance policy from shopee to secure product quality

If buyers want to exchange good, they have to pay:

Doesn’t allow ordering for someone else:

Chatting allows argument between sellers and buyers:

App is laggy and slow:

When I got here, I realized that the reasons I found among my interviewees also align with what I found while read online: Buyers have limited trust on sellers which consiquencially lead to lack of trust in good quality.

To do another further step, I went on Youtube searching for more Shopee reviews,

Using the search terms: “mua hang tren shopee” (Translated: Shopping on Shopee)

Out of the first 12 videos results, 5 are about how to not get fake goods on Shopee or story about how buyers got fake goods.

At this point, I realized that

Shopee biggest weak point is its inability to facilitate trust in the sellers on their site despite an incredible number of sellers, products and buyers.

Shopee has been successful in UA by having cheap sales, variety of products and competitive market but lacking trust in its vendors might allow competitors to take advantage and surpass Shopee. I cannot access the amount of iOS app download for Shopee and their close competitor but according to iPrice, their website access, Sendo has been chasing after Shopee very quickly in Vietnam market.

Competitive Analysis

Tiki.vn, Lazada & Sendo are probably the most direct competitor of Shopee right now in Vietnam so I also asked comparison questions to my interviewees. Here were the results about Shopee competitors:

Tiki.vn : Trustworthy direct distributor with quality goods but still lack of variety in good and shipping areas
Lazada: Variety of good but expensive and deals are not too different from retail prices
Sendo: Very similar to Shopee but backed up by FPT = a company with long standing history in Vietnam that has built trust in Vietnam online shopping/tech industry for years

Out of the 3 main competitors, Sendo seems to be gaining popularity over this year with similar business strategy, however, they might possibly surpass Shopee because a built in trust they have from FPT depite not actully having better good quality reviews than Shopee. So far, we have been seeing a common theme here – Lack of trust. So then I decided to start thinking of solutions to this problems. While doing research, I realize that a lot of people go outside of the platform to ask about deals, experiences and tips on shopping on Shopee. There was hundreds of posts and videos regarding this topic. videos of tips to review on incredible deals reading tips on how to shop on Shopee. Specifically, I came across a group called “Nghien Shopee” (Translated: Addicted to Shopee) with over 200,000 members, all sharing experiences on Shopee and such. They all seem to love Shopee, hence the name, yet still seek out help from fellow Shopee users to help them decide what to buy.

At this point, the problem was clear.

Buyers want direct feedback from fellow buyers

Hence there are hundreds of ariticles, videos about how to buy quality good on shopee and such. And even Facebook Group name Nghien Shopee ( Addicted to Shopee) with 200k members where they share tips, tricks and good deals review what they’ve gotten on Shopee, that are not necessarily from Shopee Mall stores.

Identifying the Problem

Ideating Solution

How to build a trustworthy platform where users not only go back to shop but also stop looking for reliable sources?

** Messages among buyers to ask about a product

** Allow other users to reply to feedback to a store

** Add verified buyers to prevent fake reviews

** Add category to rate feedback ( like Yelp = useful, funny, cool..)

** Within each shopping category, there’s featured shop (not brand)

** Buyers tips tab

** Buyers communication tab

** Buyers recommendation tabs

After a few ideas, I realize that all my idea could be incorporated in just 1 a community tab, where buy can do all what I have mentioned and what they have been doing on other social media platform groups!

Theory

Target Users

Shopee buyers that want to look for real tips, tricks and good deals posted by other buyers.

Design Goals

To create a trustworthy community that would allow buyers to share their knowledge and experiences on buying goods on Shopee which would ultimately facilitate trust among Shopee buyers.

Some of the application's features and functionalities would include:

· Trending post (determine by likes and interaction to post)

· Popular topic tags

· Marketing post will be blocked to allow genuine community

· A feed of everything that have been posted in different sub category

· Like and comment sections below post, user can reply to each other

· Search tab if looking for specific things (store name, goods, etc)

· Messaging tab between users

· People who post a lot of reviews will receive tag or banner next to their user name for contributing

User Scenario

User’s looking to buy nail polish on Shopee
User has a favorite nail polish shop but they want to see how a polish name “Pink Diamond” look like in real life
User can’t find any picture in the reviews section of “Pink Diamond”
User goes on Community tab in order to search for more reviews and photos
User sees a post about their favorite nail shop from another users
User messages the poster to ask for a real photo of “Pink Diamond” while also reply to questions about the polish shop in the comment section.

Wireframes