Cultivating Engagement
Reimagining the customer experience to support shopping journeys and goals
Context
At the time of this project, Wish was a company attempting a turn-around, after a tremendous pinnacle during the pandemic. From being the most downloaded app of 2018 and the third largest eCommerce platform in the US, Wish’s fortunes had dramatically changed. I joined the company during a drive by new leadership, eager to do what it took to reclaim customer engagement and deliver better business outcomes. To make good on all these business aspirations, I was asked to develop a design vision for the consumer experience, without distracting other teams.
To understand how to approach the challenge, I looked at a number of key metrics for the business and found some interesting trends:
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Daily active users and session times were decreasing
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Browse depth was shallow
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Conversions were flat
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However, Search traffic was increasing, demonstrating customer effort to find specific products
I also looked at customer perception patterns, provided by our quarterly brand tracking survey. While the top complaints were things that design improvement couldn’t solve for (product quality and authenticity, shipping cost and time,) the next order customer challenges were things that design could address, with support:
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Customer didn’t believe Wish had products they would want (why they didn’t consider Wish)
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Not being able to find anything interesting to buy (why they didn’t buy on Wish)
Another fact of this business: at the time 80% of customers were in North America and North Western Europe, while 90% of merchants were in China. A design vision needed to account for western audience sensibilities and reading needs.
A few other points of context to note:
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Internally, much attention was paid to fast rising competitors (Shein, Temu) To compete, some colleagues thought we needed to emulate their approach to experience design, which was designed more for eastern audiences used to dense layouts.
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Personalization only occurred on the home page, and was based on purchases, not browsing behavior.
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Wish had completed a rebranding effort which was being used for marketing collateral, but was not embraced by leaders, and thus not integrated into the product design, resulting in the experience looking inconsistent and unprofessional.
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Employees were looking for signals that the business could climb back to past heights. A new experience vision could inspire both customers and employees.
An overview of the brand elements that were waiting to be used in the product. While visually compelling, they could distract customers from their shopping path.
Overview
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Wish, once a top eCommerce platform, struggled post-pandemic with declining user engagement, shallow browsing, and flat conversions.
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A small design tiger team focused on supporting customers through their shopping journeys, and designing for shopping intent.
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The revamped experience received executive approval and reshaped the product roadmap, plotting a path to regain customer trust.
How did the design team build the experience strategy to address user pain points and reinvigorate employee morale?
Outcomes (and Learnings)
The designs were well received by the executive staff, as well as the board. The CPO was ready to bring these ideas to life, which meant the Q2 Roadmap was adapted, with Design providing the north star for where we were headed. And I had the privilege of presenting these ideas to the broader company at the weekly company all-hands meeting.
Other great outcomes:
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We partnered with the PM team to reshape the roadmap, and develop a shared experimentation plan, with a focus on iteration.
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Language has shifted in the organization: product & engineering started talking about customer intent and jobs to be done as part of framing their roadmap goals
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And best of all, the team got to witness the power of design and storytelling to inspire - our vision presentation at the all-hands meeting yielded general excitement (and expressions of hope) from across the company.
A Key Learning:
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While we were asking to invent without disturbing others, I would have preferred to include partners earlier in the process. Cross-functional relationships are crucial, so I had to do some work to reestablish connection.
Assumptions
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Observed metrics and data point to the opportunity to address product discovery. People visit, but are not effective at finding things. We need to evaluate what is missing from our home page experience that can support discovery.
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We wanted to design with our key personas in mind. Two personas represented customers who were willing to put in work to find deals or treasures which which meant taking time to find products across multiple shopping sessions.
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We were missing the opportunity to support customers shopping for deals and treasures, which can occur across multiple shopping sessions.
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With 80% of the customer revenue coming from northwestern Europe and North America, we needed to attend to this customer group’s content sensibilities and way of reading. Our most lucrative customers benefit from space and clean structure to read and understand content.
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We needed an experience that embraced the new brand elements with color and elements tuned to support shopping imagery, rather than compete with it.
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We needed to develop a vision as rapidly as possible to influence planning and ensure availability of engineering resources.
Company
Role
VP of Product Design
Team
Project team: 5
Total Team: 30
Research & Explore
The first task in working toward an experience vision was to identify my team. I built a team of 4 diverse thinkers, including the director on my team, to imagine and explore possibilities. Because my total team was fairly lean at the time, I also needed to help balance the work on their plate. I also worked closely with this team given the importance of this initiative, and the need to move quickly.
To bring fresh eyes to developing a vision, we took the following steps to feed our thinking:
1. We looked at the competitive landscape:
The team analyzed and explored popular shopping experiences for our target customers, with special attention to our most shopped categories (clothing, accessories, and home goods.) For comparison, we also looked at those fast rising competitors from Asia who were more focused on designing for consumers who read dense, pictographic languages, to help us understand their trends and their pitfalls.
2. We looked at relevant research resources:
We studied the latest and greatest insights from our internal research team, ensuring we immersed ourselves in the most important learnings from studying our current experience. In particular, we looked at the mental models for the key personas to understand what motivated our customers shopping choices. These motivations or thinking styles clue us in on how customers frame shopping decisions.
We found an important paper from Google Research, focused on the consumer shopping process. It’s a fascinating read: Google’s work on the messy middle of shopping. This paper highlights elements of the core shopping funnel that commerce companies all know by heart. A critical tenant of the paper is that shopping is a dance between exploration & consideration, and shoppers are locked in that orbit, balancing reason & emotion when deciding what to buy. To help people exit the messy middle, we need to understand their cognitive biases and how they shift between developing a consideration set of possible products, and evaluating the collected products to select the item they will buy. We needed to understand what was required to help customers feel confident enough to make their purchase with Wish, thereby creating an exit velocity from the messy middle orbit.
We also consulted the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework, developed by The Christensen Institute. For those unfamiliar, the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework suggests that everything a customer is doing is in service of a larger intention or goal, or put another way, it looks at customers’ motivations for shopping. JTBD asks us to focus the customer’s goals and circumstances that underpin their shopping behavior. Read more about JTBD here.
A new model of shopping, incorporating new learnings
We selected the best elements from the different sketches into wireframes and then to higher fidelity work. As we stepped up in fidelity, we selectively brought the brand palette and elements, in a way that didn’t compete with the product imagery. The team also took time to imagine new shopping modules that could fit into the shopping experience and new cross-selling opportunities - a fun and engaging exploration that inspired the design team. After several iterations and regular feedback, we developed a compelling visual narrative that connected to our brand goals that also solved essential customer problems and facilitated shopping journeys.
A view of the shopping flow that helps someone pick up with their previous shopping for a smart watch (click to see details).
We thought through levels of effort to deliver our concept, to plan for an evolution to the complete concept (click to see details).
Design & Iterate
After we grounded our thinking in research, the competitive landscape, and the potential for improving our experience, I prompted the team to think about telling a good shopping story: Each member took one of the three personas and developed a shopping JBTD narrative for that persona. Building a narrative allowed the team to understand a more comprehensive view of the experience, rather than focusing on micro-interactions or single elements. We were here to build a vision.
We also focused on hand sketches rather than Figma, to allow us to focus on the design problem, structure and flow, as well as customer needs and intentions. We held regular feedback sessions, selected the best elements to drive the narrative and use to create customer delight.
An example flow and story for a persona.
We kept early sketches loose to avoid locking into old patterns.
As the team developed the screens, I drafted the narrative to pitch this vision to the executive team for feedback and buy-in. I detailed a single shopping story focused on a specific JTBD: a customer returning to the app to continue searching for a great deal on a smart watch. A focused story allowed us to give a clean and crisp example that included how we honored customer goals, expressed the multi-session “pick-up-where-you-left-off” idea, and allowed us to bring in additional ideas developed by the broader design team around video recommendations and shopping guides. A focused story gave the executive team a clear message and focus for feedback.
We also took into consideration engineering effort, and developed mild, medium, and spicy examples of all the pages, which helped facilitate good conversations with our engineering counterparts and crystalize our understanding of what would be possible.
3. We examined our own experience's ability to support customer shopping intentions, goals and thinking styles:
The current experience was based on a discovery-based shopping philosophy. That is, the assumption that people prefer to browse and find something interesting without any particular goal in mind. This philosophy leads to an over-reliance on feeds and deals to entice customers, but misses the reality that for many kinds of shopping journeys, customers shop with a goal, or job to be done, in mind. While shopping can be for entertainment, the majority of shopping jobs have a more practical intention.
As a result, we found that the Wish experience didn’t serve customers with a clear JTBD well, especially if that job was a highly considered purchase or one that required evaluation of multiple products to find the right one. Rather, Wish was more focused on showing what might be generally popular, which ran the risk of not being helpful to customers. Wish was delivering experience for those with low shopping intent; without a clear job to be done other than impulse shopping.
4. We developed a combined model for supporting shopping intent:
As we took all of this knowledge into account, we iterated on a framework describing the shopping funnel AND one describing essential page designs (Home page, PLPs and PDPs). We all know the shape of the shopping funnel. I wanted to include all the learnings about the messy middle, the JTBD model and helping people develop and refine their shopping intent. We also needed to factor in the customers' thinking styles (persona). In addition, incentives that drive a customer to shop.
As we assist people on their shopping journey, we need to connect related products to support the progress of a customer’s shopping journey. That is, rather than transitioning them from a product that satisfies their specific journey into an unrelated feed of products, we need to understand customer’s shopping journey and continue to offer them related products and services to fully enable their bigger shopping goal, and encourage them to exit that messy middle to purchase with Wish.
Examining how the current and proposed designs would support different customer intentions
