Designing a Faster Shopping Experience for Lazada App
UX Research Case Study
Introduction
Let’s describe a regular day of shopping in present time: You launch your preferred shopping app on a device, type in a keyword search or snap a picture and in return you get tons of offers, hundreds of sellers and stores you used to frequent in real life are now ready to ship at your fingertips. Online shopping is all about convenience, but how fast do you cart items out?
After making a few purchases and looking through the Lazada app, I thought — how can I make it easier for users to shop on the app? For the record, Lazada has quite a presence in the e-commerce situation. Besides holding a humongous amount of product listings, it also hosts a variety of content, all on a rather cluttered interface.
To kick start the research process, I worked collaboratively with 3 UX designers to analyse the Lazada users and look at the problems that surfaced. Thereafter, I worked independently to finalise and present the key solutions.
Note: I am in no way affiliated to Lazada and the entire research and design process for this UX research case study was constructed by my team and I.
The Process
The team conducted an in-depth understanding on the shopping habits of users on Lazada app. Contextual inquiries were held and interacting with the active users taught me a lot about the consumers in the space. A competitive analysis was profiled for Lazada to analyse different features available on both Lazada and its competitors. We can always learn from competition! 2 rounds of surveys were also sent out to a total of 58 active users to draw imperative insights.
The problems became clear with the data collected and we decided to focus on the main use case where most opportunities arise. Ideation began with sketches, wireframes, followed by design mockups to illustrate the solution.
The Research
Research was conducted using a few methodologies — desk research, contextual inquiry, user interviews and surveys.
Contextual Inquiry
The goal was to find out how users navigate through the app in the context of purchasing an item on the app, the following steps were taken to ensure we fully understand the experience each user went through:
- Background understanding on participants
- Get participants to use the app to walk us through how they would purchase a phone cover
- Task participants to purchase 3 items, namely a food item/household item/fashion item — to look at how they go about using the app to complete these tasks
- Perform observation with informal questions during the inquiry
They expressed a few core concerns with shopping on the app such as how overloaded information on the product page makes it difficult to find product information, and the navigation bar was hardly noticeable (the common habit was to scroll, and that significantly took time).
Product page does not have enough details about the item that can be seen at one glance. — Ana. An avid user of the app.
Affinity Map
With the data gathered from user research, my team came together to make groupings of similar observations. I constructed an affinity map and used it to surface the key issues common amongst users.
The Problems
The affinity map categorised common pain points and my team decided to work on the highest priority issues which address the product landing page. We constructed 2 ‘How Might We’ problem statements to identify the key issues in a concise manner.
The Personas
Conducting research, analysing Lazada’s primary competition and speaking to the many active users helped me gain a deep understanding of the primary shoppers, which I identified Sarah The Specific Buyer and Sam The Savvy Spender as the two main categories to define the key audience segment of the app. While both personas were used consistently as a core reference for the project, our first persona — Sarah The Specific Buyer, ran with more opportunities.
In this article, I will be covering the solution for our first persona. If you would like to see the entire documentation of the project, here is where you can find it.
Customer Journey Map
I mapped out the customer journey of Sarah The Specific Buyer to identify the opportunities for the app to grow.
Design Iterations
A site map of the current app was constructed before wireframing could begin — having the site map in place was important since the Lazada app would be complicated to work on without having an understanding of its information architecture (IA). This provided a clear look at the various components leading from homepage to cart out which is the journey our customer goes through.
User Flow
The primary use case was the purchase item flow where we looked at the various touch points the user encounters in the customer journey. Focusing on the user’s navigation on the product page — I created a flow chart to lay out the user’s actions to complete the task.
Sketches and Wireframes
With the sketches as a reference point, I constructed the wireframe for the original user flow and listed the issues for each individual screen, at the same time mapping out the outline and structure for me to proceed to the solution mockup.
Solution — Improving the Visual Hierarchy of Product Screen
The highest priority problem was the visual hierarchy of the product page. My team conducted 2 rounds of surveys — during the second round, the team wanted to be very clear that we were providing solutions to real needs for real users. The following data responses from 39 users made our solutioning even clearer! When asked about the difficulty they faced while navigating on the product page, users responded:
We understood what did not work so well for users — it was generally difficult for users to navigate through a lengthy product page, not to mention getting distracted by the recommended products on the ‘Recommended For You’ section. The issue was clear, and I went on to translate the solution into a mockup.
Mockup
Results + Next Steps
A working prototype of the solution will be shared with users (if you are a Lazada app user yourself, and is interested in testing the new product enhancement, do not hesitate to send me a message!
There is definitely a clear demand for Lazada in the e-commerce market. The biggest struggle however with the Lazada app is the overload of content and similar UI that does not differ from some of its primary competitors. To stand out amongst the competition, Lazada app can definitely invest in improving its branding system as well as having flexible processes such as personalisation of content, and to focus on the essentials.
Thanks for reading!
If you would like to see the entire documentation of this project or more of my work, you can find me on my design website where I share my works regularly.
Feel free to contact me at my email if you have any comments or feedback about the project — work.lwloh@gmail.com
See you at the next!
