Alibaba

What is Tmall

Tmall is one of the largest B2C online retail platforms in the world, currently operating under Alibaba Group. I worked on the Tmall design team as the only product/UX design intern on the team in summer 2017.

Objectives

Therefore, my goal for this project is to determine and incorporate the missing functionalities and deliver better coverage of user scenarios by designing the Tmall suppliers working platform for mobile.

Research

To better design for mobile, I started by getting to know the desktop version better. I met with the product and operation teams and thoroughly explored the platform on my own. From there, I talked with several suppliers over the phone (since they are all based in different parts of China) to establish the user flow, gauge the frequency of use and identify the pain points. Based on my research results, I outlined 2 user personas together with a detailed customer journey map as shown below.

Some key takeaways from the persona and customer journey map:

• Users need to quickly learn the content structure, easily locate the desired functionalities and hence efficiently carry out intended operations. In addition, the design should lay the foundation for consistent user experience in subsequent versions.

• Users are unable to check available time slots at different warehouses when no computer is immediately available and couldn’t receive info update in real-time which have resulted in low scheduling efficiency.

• Users are unable to check their operation status when no computer is immediately available. In addition, they only have limited understanding of the metrics used in calculating the status score which means that they can’t take effective measures when abnormal situations arise.

Define

While this project aims to build a mobile version of the Tmall suppliers working platform, it is both unrealistic and not very user-friendly to simply migrate all the functionalities available on the desktop over without discretion. Therefore, in order to maximize the impact of this 1st version of the mobile platform, I established 3 criteria to help me identify the most critical functionalities to design and implement:

Ideate & Prototype

Based on the 3 criteria identified above and taking user’s needs distilled from the research phase into consideration, I decided to focus on 3 functionalities, namely the homepage (and hence the overall structure), warehouse time slots and the supplier status. The ideation and final prototypes are as shown below.

Results

Due to an emergency change in priorities within the team, the development schedule for this project was delayed until after the end of my internship. Nonetheless, my designs represent some of the earliest works and explorations on mobile back-end products for Tmall and some of the aforementioned features were later incorporated into and utilized by other Tmall mobile products.

Learnings

Communicate early and often.

It is important to adapt the design process to the project.

Overview

This is the second major project I worked on during my internship. It took 4 weeks to complete.

Research

To better understand users’ needs in detail, I conducted interviews with the designers, developers and the operations team respectively. The interview results are summed up as below:

Define

Based on the interview results, I outlined 3 key points to guide my design:

• The web app layout should fit actual user scenarios.

• It should be flexible, precise and intuitive.

• The design should follow a strict hierarchy, ranked by the importance and usage frequency of the data.

Ideate & Prototype

With the 3 key points in mind and following relevant design guidelines, I quickly prototyped the 1st version:

Evaluation & Testing

When I brought the design in for evaluation and testing with the stakeholders, it was suggested that:

• For security reasons, visitor ID should not be directly displayed on the homepage but remain accessible via a hyperlink to retain efficiency.

• 'Pageload' performance data and page component usage time should relocate to the 'overview' section to ensure a better fit with the actual user scenarios. This change, in turn, necessitates the need for horizontal scrolling.

• User should be able to simultaneously select multiple types of data for easier comparison.

• The operation systems and geographical locations of page visitors are of little importance to all 3 parties of users (namely designers, developers and the operations team) and thus will not be displayed.

• It will be more suitable to represent operation steps and the number of interactions with the 'submit' button with spreadsheet instead of line plot as precise values take precedence over the trend.

Final Design

Taking the suggestions mentioned above into consideration, I iterated and arrived at the final design as shown below which was then implemented and made accessible to all internal employees at Tmall, Alibaba.

Results

The design improved the efficiency and effectiveness of data retrieval and analysis by ~20% and was received positively by all parties involved (designers, developers and the operations team).

Learnings

Prototype fast and gather feedback early.

Sometimes, the seemingly conflicting interests on the surface may share deeper roots in common.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!