Project Management to Increase Orders
A project to increase conversion by creating a project management feature which addresses underlying causes of attrition;
Team: Alibaba User Journey
The Problem: A large number of Alibaba buyers use Alibaba to find suppliers, but collaborate offline to finalize order details and make purchases directly from suppliers. Creating a project management feature to keep purchases on platform was a key goal set by Alibaba leadership.
Less than 1% of UV end in an order.
After working with stakeholders to develop a research plan to address buyers’ project management needs, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 buyers to understand:
The overall buyer journey, and moments when buyers go offline.
User Goals and pain points that cause buyers to go offline
User goals and pain points at every step of the buyer journey.
Buyers were recruited to get a range of levels of experience with Alibaba, average order size, levels of product customization, and product categories.
Communication Pain Points
The process of communicating and negotiating product specifications in the Alibaba message center emerged as a key pain point, which influenced buyers’ decisions to leave the platform.
Alibaba Message Center
Buyers message between four and ten sellers to source a single product, and often have difficulty keeping track of the product specifications they negotiate with each seller.
The message center has a long stream of unstructured communication, which made it difficult to find product specifications or to keep track of what had been agreed on.
Users left the message center and used WeChat, Whatsapp, and email to communicate, and used spreadsheets and notes written on printouts of messages to track product specifications. It was an inefficient process, but it was easier than using the Alibaba message center.
Structuring communication between buyer and seller
It became clear that the lack of structure in the communication of product specifications was the underlying cause of a lot of the pain points which emerged from my research. While buyers arrived at their own ad hoc solutions after going off platform, few of them were satisfied with those solutions either. Working with a UX designer, we brainstormed different ways to combine unstructured communication with the structured communication of product specifications, and looked at how that would influence buyer goals and pain points at different steps of the buyer journey.
Prototyping Solutions
Starting with low fidelity prototypes made with Google Sheets, we created progressively higher fidelity wireframes as users validated our designs.
Proposed features included line item agreement, allowing buyers to propose changes, and sellers to either accept, reject or suggest alternatives.
We also used this as a space to educate users about Trade Assurance, Alibaba’s purchase protection program.
A progress bar allows buyers and sellers to track a project’s completeness.
In usability tests, I measured user satisfaction with the Alibaba message center, their existing solution (e.g. email and spreadsheets), against the prototype. This allowed me to make a clear presentation on the impact these feature changes would have on specific user goals.
Addressing Points in the user journey when buyers go offline
When presenting the project to senior stakeholders in Hangzhou, I mapped out a user journey with key points that buyers go offline with their order, and showed how the proposed features would add value that addressed user goals and pain points when they were most likely to leave the platform.
Next Steps
The project was put on hold due to a planned overhaul of the backend of the messaging system. Had it proceeded as planned, the next step would have been to conduct research on sellers in China to identify their user goals and pain points, map their user journey, and design a seller side solution to address their needs.