Research / UX Design
Customized service on
Double-sided E-commerce
Provide a better user experience when consumer oreder a customize product on C2C E-commerce.
Intro
Roles
User research / UX Design
Project Type
Master Thesis
Timeline
Jun 2021 - Jan 2022
Overview
The goal of this research was to effectively improve the user experience of purchasing customized products. This research examined existing customization services on an e-commerce platform by service design, sorted out key insight needs of users by interviews, evaluated proposed conceptual functions through the Kano model, and proposed relevant conclusions and suggestions.
Key outcomes
This research provided main contributions as follows:
Providing needed information and fluid process of purchasing a custom product.
Enhancing user experience for both sellers and consumers when they use the E-commerce platform.
The possibility of promoting sales using user intention, even the branding values, to strengthen the market positions of the e-commerce platforms.
Research backgrounds
More consumers shop on the internet
With the development of internet technology, consumers are getting used to purchasing products on e-commerce platforms.
The influences of experience economics
Along with experience economics, more and more consumers care about the qualities and unique feelings when they make a purchase. According to research, consumers intend to pay more than 20-50% of the budget to buy a customized product.
The needs to reduce the barrier of operating customized services
Successful business models for customized services come from large brands. In comparison, customized service is difficult to provide by e-commerce sellers with a mid-small scale because of the higher costs.
Statements
Therefore, the research was narrowed down to explore the experience of consumers buying custom products on E-commerce platforms and to find out:
Why do people order custom products?
What’s frustrating about the ordering process?
What’s enjoyable about the process?
What’s frustrating about selling custom products?
Design Process
The structure of this research was based on the Double Diamond design process and was divided into three stages.
User experience study
Firstly, content analysis and interviews were used to explore the existing service information architecture, pain points, and requirements of users.
User experience design
In this phase, conceptual functions and solutions were proposed by holding a co-creation workshop for brainstorming design concepts that use the online collaboration tool, Miro.
User experience evaluation
The Kano model was used to evaluate the proposed prototype and the results of evaluation were discussed to prioritize the solutions.
User experience study
User Interview
Young consumers *9
16-35 years old, with experience of making purchases online due to their:
Further intention to do more online shopping.
Tendency to pay more attention to a unique buying experience.
Sellers *3
The experience of selling customized products for over half a year on Pinkoi.
Target Platform
Pinkoi
Famous for selling gift and design products.
Compared with other e-commerce platforms, more sellers provide customized services here.
Persona
Then, this research created persona profiles to help provide a concrete image of the consumers and sellers for which we were designing in the next phase.
Primary Persona - Consumer
Behavior
Check the reviews from other consumers
Care about the attitude of customer service
Frustrations
Waste a lot of time to check the information when purchasing
Based on custom product can’t be returned , afraid of product don’t reflect expectations from photos
Michelle
Marketer, 29
Motivation
Get an exclusive symbol to express myself
Strategy
Spend lots of time to do researching & camparing
Mostly care about the product quality
Exclusive order
Motivation
A memorial to express the relationship with friend
Strategy
Have time limitation to get the product
More focus on the way of expressing memorial value
Commemorative gift
College student, 22
Ruby
Secondary Persona - Seller
I love to help clients create unique products, but I spent a lot of time to manage orders and communicate with them.
Jessie
Graphic Designer, 28
Target clients: Mainly females, age 20-35
Goals
Improve orders
Enhance the efficiency of customization process
Get good reviews from clients
Concern
Consumers have difficulty understanding the rules for customization options
Spend a lot of time sorting orders and responding to customers
Get negative reviews from customers
User Journey map
The researcher demonstrated the end-to-end flow of the customization process through a journey map to display the pain points for both consumers and sellers.
Problem statements
Collected lots of information by interviewing 9 consumers and 3 sellers about the customization process, the researcher began sorting it by giving the conversation a code to categorize its properties. Furthermore, here are some of the insights the research uncovered:
Consumers often buy custom products for sentimental reasons; some of them buy products for events like friend’s birthdays or weddings, and another buy custom products to present personal style.
Compared with general online shopping, the purchasing process of customization is more complicated to consumers. They needed to be resolved many confusions when faced with plenty of information.
In the existing process, consumers need to fill in the requirements of customized spec by themselves by comparing the text information, and some sellers even provide consumers another website to choose customized options, and these situations will cause inconvenience to both buyers and sellers.
Consumers are usually worried that the results of the customized product are not as expected, so they often intend to confirm with the seller first to ensure that the expectations of both parties can be met.
Sellers want to get good reviews on E-commerce, so they often go above and beyond when custom orders get messed up since they want to please buyers.
Thus, the problem statement was born.
How migh we
How might we align the expection of consumers with sellers, when they purchase a custom product on E-commerce?
User experience Design
Design Goals
Through online co-creation workshop with professional designers, we defined several proposals to solve the problems, and roughly discussed what the functions should be, to let the solutions land.
How might we aligh the expection of consumers with sellers, when they purchase a custom product on E-commerce?
An improvement in information transparency of the customization process
Accompanying suggestions on customization options
Provision of clear descriptive examples for purchasing scenarios
Real-time interactive communication channels
A clear and one-directional order process
Key findings
Real-time communication
To reduce the cognition difference between buyers and sellers, they need a real-time channel to interact with each other.
Visualize production process
It’s also necessary to visualize the customized process information, and to make the customized process transparent and open, thereby reducing the cognitive burden on consumers.
Simplification of operation
The process of customization need to be simplified in a clear way, so that can reduce the cognitive load and doubts to the main users when they face to information.
Product preview
A visual image of what the consumer can predict the outcome of the product needs to be provided to ensure that the consumer has reasonable expectations for the finished product.
New process of purchasing custom products
This research proposed 6 functional concepts to enhance the user experience of customization service, and below are the introductions according to the purchasing process.
Before purchasing
Seller
product setting
Optional customization forms
Setting the customization spec at the backend platform
Lauch Product
Consumer
searching & compare
Filtering labels related to customization
Use the filter of customized service to find related products
Displaying the customized product
Refer the photos of custom product and the reviews from other consumers
During purchasing
Seller
Communicate with clients
Instant messaging of order
Use the real-time channel to resolve the problems from clients
Consumer
Choose customized spec
Optional customization forms
Use the customed form to choose the spec
Order product
After purchasing
Seller
Get orders
Orders management
Production
Checking the production status of a product
Record the status of production
Send product
Consumer
Waiting for get custom product
Checking the production status of a product
Check the producing status of custom product
Review product & service
Service Review
User will get the discount coupon by giving the seller review, including provide the photo of recieved product and service comment.
User experience Evaluation
This research use Kano model to prioritize the most critical functions to users. Researcher used online form to ask users the close-end questions, to qualitative the feedbacks from consumers. This research got 104 filled forms from respondents in total.
About Kano model
Kano model is a framework to prioritizing features on a product roadmap based on the degree to which they are likely to satisfy customers. There have totally 5 quality attributes to categorize the satisfactions.
Must-be: It means the requirements that the customers expect and are taken for granted.
One-dimensional: It result in satisfaction when fulfilled and dissatisfaction when not fulfilled.
Attractive: It provide satisfaction when achieved fully, but don’t cause dissatisfaction when not fulfilled
Indifferent: It means customers won’t care about that whether fulfilled or not.
Reverse: It will make customer dissatisfaction when fulfilled it.
Investigated user satisfaction according to a group of positive and negative questions to get the result.
Respondents
Basic information
The data shows that there have more women intend to buy custom products.In our point of view, which validated that the customers often buy custom products for sentimental reasons.
Male
Female
Gender
Purchasing Behaviors
The first pie chart indicated the consumer seldom buys the custom product, then the second one showed most people only have one time to buy it, and the last one demonstrated that gifting is the most common motivation to buy a custom product.
Validation results
5 Attractive & 1 indifference quality attributes
The datas showed “Checking the production status of a product”, “Instant messaging of order”, “Displaying the customized product”, “Optional customization forms”, and “Filtering labels related to customization” were considered by consumers as attractive quality attributes. Nevertheless, the first three items had a higher degree of satisfaction.
Conclusions
Therefore, the results of this research were as follows:
Consumers’ motivations for purchasing customized products were mainly classified as “exclusive order” and “commemorative gift”.
The main users were “young consumer groups” and their four key insight requirements were “real-time communication”, “visualization of the production process”, “simplification of operation”, and “product preview”.
Most of the functional concepts will improve customer satisfaction after a user survey.
However, this research proposed customization service design suggestions for e-commerce platforms were as follows:
An improvement in information transparency of the customization process.
Accompanying suggestions on customization options.
Provision of clear descriptive examples for purchasing scenarios.
Real-time interactive communication channels.
A clear and single order guidance process.