Work Experience
Smart Daily - A Residential Property Management System for Communities
Redesigning an online service ordering experience by identifying the user needs to provide a user-friendly process.
Role
Product Designer, Product Manager
Year
2020
Team
1 UI Designer, 1 Marketing Specialist, and 6 Software Engineers
Product Platform
Mobile(iOS & Android)
Project At A Glance
Redesigning the online ordering experience for postal service with research insights to fulfill users' needs.
When I took over the project, the online ordering service for the postal service was already finished its MVP test and was prepared to officially release it to the public. Before that, we needed to solve the significant usability issues for the best user experience and reduce the workload for the customer service team. We started with conducting user research to understand the current usability issues of the service and users' experiences and expectations. Based on the insights, we redesigned key features and rolled out the service to all of the users in Taiwan.
problem
Focusing on verifying the business value and lack of consideration from the users' perspectives led to bad product design with complaints from users.
solution
Redesigning the features and user flows to provide sufficient information in the process and a convenient checkout flow to improve overall service ratings from users.
# Backgroud
Smart Daily is KNST's property management platform. The platform has over 1.5 million active users daily. It aims at providing the residents in each apartment or community a tool to solve any living-related problems/requests with one tap on their phone.
The online postal service was the latest addition to Smart Daily. When this project started, they just finished the MVP test and planned to roll out this service to the entire Taiwan.
# Problem
Starting as an MVP(Minimum Viable Product) product, the service was introduced to people with basic functions without any consideration for user experience. While it successfully passed the MVP test, the timeline set for releasing the service to the public was tight, and there wasn't much time to revamp the whole service.
Based on the 80-20 rule, we believe that the user experience could be greatly improved if we identify the key issues. Therefore, we reframe our problem for this product design to:
" ...how might we redesign the service that fulfills users' critical needs with minimal effort while greatly improving the user experience? "
# Design Solution
## Your Addresses Function
On the page that users enter the recipient information, we add the button on the top indicating there is a list of recipients' information they could choose from.
Because the reading direction is from the top to bottom, we try to prevent the situation users discover this function after filling in all of the information already. Based on the same concept, once users finish entering the recipient information, we offer an option at the bottom in which users could decide to save this information or not.
Once the list of recipients' information is stored in Your Addresses, users could choose the address directly and edit the list.
## Purchase Again Function
Your Addresses function only provides convenience when entering the recipient’s information, but users still need to select other service details. After discussion internally with product designers in other teams, we decided to add one feature which is the ability to place the same order directly from the order history.
The feature is not only used in the online postal service but also used across the platform. There are several services on the platform and the original design of the platform would make users difficult to find the service they want. This feature would greatly reduce the time users needed to search the service, and skip the process of selecting the service options.
## Detailed Order Information
We add the online postal service detail information in the order overview section before the user places the order. So that the user could have the enough information before making purchasing decision. The information provided here includes estimated delivery time and also the additional fee for the destination in a remote area.
That information is displayed in red color which attracts the attention of the user.
## Additional Ordering Option
On the first page of the online postal service, we add the checkboxes including “Delivery Notice” and “Agree to the service agreement”. We put that information below the service options because users care more about the service they want in the beginning. Once they decide to make the purchase decision, they would start to consider the further details.
The Delivery Notice section remains the flexibility which the marketing team could add or modify the contents based on situation at any given time, and the notice would be recorded the term each time users agree to.
The design of service agreement would require users to agree the term before continuing to the following steps.
As mentioned above in the user pain points section, some communities do not have a doorman so that the logistics company might fail to pick up the package. In order to solve this problem, after that discussion with the logistics company, we decided to add one more option before users placing orders.
The option is to ask the logistics company to call users before picking up the package so that users could hand in the package in person. This option is presented under the community selection with the following pop-up window upon checking the checkbox to notify users details.
# HOW WE GOT HERE
## Process
As the service was planned to roll out in a short time frame, we needed to discover problems and deliver new features as soon as possible. Therefore, we speeded up the progress from research to validate with the randomly selected users to test our design prototype.
## Constraint
There were two main challenges/limitations at the time.
1. Limit resources from the development team
This service was one of all products and there were several features under development at the same time, that was impossible to have all of the resources to deliver the completed redesign at one time, we have to find the best solutions from the perspectives of both users and the engineering team and implement step by step.
2. Consistency with the existing product design
This service is based on the existing platform, therefore the design must consider the system consistency to reduce the influence of the overall user experience. On the other hand, we also need to understand the constraint of the original platform so that the redesign would not exceed the possibility of the platform.
To conclude, the most challenging part is to find the balance in all time so that the product could be delivered on time with high quality, and enjoyed by users.
## Research
We used two methods to conduct research, "survey", and "contextual interview" trying to identify the user behavior of using postal service, especially under the influence of the pandemic, and current usability issues of the service.
Focused on two main research questions:
- 1. Who is the user of this service? and what are their user behaviors when using this?
- 2. What are the user pain points when using the service?
Method - Survey
We designed the survey with the focus on collecting the user habit of using postal service(no limit to our online postal service) to gain an overview of user behaviors on our platform. By pushing notifications directly through App, we collected 3279 responses within 2 weeks.
Method - Contextual Inquiry
The interview focused on how they felt about the service and asked for their feedback. We recruited 5 existing Smart Daily users, who were also the MVP users in the first phase of the service for this user interview. At the same time, we also observed how they used the online postal service while adopting the think-aloud protocol.
## Finding
## Postal Service Usage
5% of the users are heavy users of the postal service, which would send more than 6 packages per month.
80% of the users are general users, which would send 1-2 packages per month.
15% of the users do not need postal services at all.
The demographic result shows that the main user types of the online postal service include two types of users:
1. General public such as homemakers.
2. Business users such as e-commerce sellers.
## User Behaviors and Expectations
85% of the users expect that the order details and status to be clear.
60% of the users send the package to the same place several times.
76% of the orders contain only one packages.
With the help of user research, it helped us to have a clear understanding of our users. The users could be roughly divided into 2 groups; one is the general public which has small demand, another one is the business users which have a consistent demand for the postal service.
## Inconvenience in entering recipient information
It is always inconvenient to enter information such as address and phone number, not only need to memorize so that you could enter, but also take effort to enter. According to our previous research, 60% of the users have the demand of sending packages to the same recipient several times.
Under the existing design, If users would like to send the packages to the same recipient several times, the user has to enter the detailed information of the recipient every single time.
## Incomplete postal service information
Generally speaking, the postal service has several key information that is important to the users, including estimated delivery time, cost of delivery, and related information.
However, that information was completed missing in the original design, which would need to call the customer services to inquiry for that. The worst situation is that, if the destination of package locates at remote area, the user would be asked to pay additional fee in person to the logistics company.
## Difficulties in package pick-up process
The package was designed to be picked up at the gate of the community However, some communities do not have a doorman to handle those affairs, which residents need to finish by themselves. In this situation, if the user uses this online postal service, the logistics company would fail to pick up the packages since no one is at the gate.
## Ideate
During the whole product design process, those 2 questions were always on my mind to inform my design decision,
- 1. What users care the most?
- 2. What causes the most serious usability issues to users?
Based on the research findings, with above design considerations, I set the two directions for product design iteration.
1. Simplify the whole process
Provide features for users to be able to use this service with ease, and match their habit of using the existing postal service.
2. Keep users in control
Reduce uncertainty for users when using the service, users should have the access to the latest information on the delivery.
With those directions, we selected the necessary improvements and pushed back other recommendations we got from the heuristic evaluation. By doing this, we successfully delivered the new product iteration to the market within two months.
# Impact
Enhance customer stickiness to the community postal service, and increase the usage rate eventually. After the rollout of the redesign version, the service orders increased over 400% with the repurchase rate increased of up to 36% in 3 months.
# takeaway
## Importance of prioritizing and considering feasibility
Other than starting from scratch again, it is always impossible to do the completed redesign implementation to the existing product in a short time. You have to consider several factors during the redesign such as the consideration to the existing users, the perspectives from the marketing team, and also how much resources you would get from the development team.
## Simple solutions could be effective
Once the key factors are identified, you could improve the overall user experience with small efforts. For instance, you don’t need to completely redesign the interface, it is possible to just change the process of the user flow or even add a couple of words to achieve the same result.
On the side, I always think about how the product design influences users' behaviors and the design mindsets/strategies behind it, which always surprises me. I enjoy talking to random people and learning something new from them, either their life experiences or tips for finding a parking space in an overly crowded city.
