Southeast Asia’s eCommerce Giant Grows Revenue by 29% with UXArmy

About the client

Our client is a Singapore based multinational tech company specializing in eCommerce. Their eCommerce portal and app sells almost everything retail, similar to amazon.com. Their app has been the go-to app for Southeast Asians and customers from other Asian countries for almost a decade.

The app has over 300 million monthly visitors. It also serves consumers and sellers across countries in East Asia and Latin America who wish to purchase and sell their goods online. In the crowded and fast moving eCommerce space, the company needs to stay ahead of the competition. Therefore they frequently launch new features and perform User interface refresh to keep users hooked on to the app and ultimately to achieve an increased basket size.

The Goal

Usability testing is time-consuming: hunting for participants, conducting interviews, analyzing results. It all adds up. UX teams are swamped with too many feature requests to know which designs to prioritize. The most valuable thing we can do is create based on customer needs. The second most valuable thing is doing it fast. At UXArmy we understand the importance of Designers’ time and we help to save their time by our unique offering. Our offering is a mix of Research skills, reliable participant recruitment services and a remote user research platform.

To continuously improve their user experience, regular end-to-end mobile app shopping experience evaluation is done including competitor benchmarks. Quantitative data from annual Satisfaction surveys is cross referenced with Qualitative data from Unmoderated Usability Testing, Eye Tracking , Online Focus Group Discussions to provide evidence and explanations for the user insights. Getting early feedback shapes better products.

With these research methods it was identified that qualitative insights were in line with nearly 60% of issues highlighted in the quantitative data. Using these insights, the client was able to formulate design and prioritize product improvements to be made to the app.

The annual consumer satisfaction surveys conducted by the market research team had indicated what issues users were facing with the eCommerce service. The UX researchers wanted to understand the issues in detail and Catch users in the act . They observed the end customers experiencing these issues and gathered first hand explanations from the users as to why and how these issues were inconveniencing them.

Some of those were interaction design problems in the new features while others were related to delivery in specific countries where packaging and delivery logistics was not working at its best for our Client, e.g. in Indonesia and The Philippines. Like Indonesia, the Philippines’ archipelagic geography poses logistical challenges for efficient delivery to remote areas. The widespread preference for cash on delivery in the Philippines also requires our Client to maintain a complex and costly cash-handling system.

The Approach

UXArmy suggested using Unmoderated Usability Testing to identify most usability issues across a larger sample size and multiple countries simultaneously.

Online Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were conducted to collect various opinions about the services offered via the app. Due to the distributed geographies, online sessions were the obvious choice to understand end user issues and gather feedback on concepts of potential solutions. These exercises were facilitated using the UXArmy DeepDive® platform.

Usability assessment of the LIVE app was needed to:

• Identify and prioritize areas for UX improvements
• Validate potential problem areas indicated by UX Satisfaction survey data
• Benchmark against the UX of competitor’s app

Over the course of 5 continuous days, participants recruited by the Client completed a series of Unmoderated Usability Testing, Eye Tracking and participated in online Focus Group Discussion.

Each of the participants were tasked with 2 of 3 activities (to avoid fatigue), namely:

• Online Focus Group Discussion
• Usability Test / Eye Tracking (smaller sample)

Participating Countries

Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan

Number of Participants

1. Usability testing: 30 participants in each of the 7 countries
2. Focus Group Discussions: 84 participants across 7 countries, 2 focus groups per country with 6 participants each.
3. Eye Tracking: ~14 participants across 7 countries

Unmoderated Usability Testing in UXArmy allows to capture screen interactions and voice via video recording. Participants think-aloud while completing their tasks on the App. These recordings are very useful to researchers because they can understand the user feedback in context of app usage. Other options to conduct unmoderated testing only offer heatmaps and navigation paths on app prototypes, thus not allowing the researchers to find the users’ thoughts behind their actions on the app.

Users’ verbal feedback and navigation patterns of the in-app shopping experience in both the Client’s app and their competitor’s app were gathered and analyzed. All tests across the 7 countries were conducted in parallel and local representatives of UXArmy facilitated in case the participants had any questions to clarify.

This understanding of user behavior enabled the researchers to determine the reasons why certain areas of the app were giving users a positive or negative user experience and in case of poor user experience, mismatch of user expectations were found. For instance in Indonesia and Philippines, most of the CoD (Cash on Delivery) payments happen via digital wallets like OVO, GoPay, Dana, GCash instead of Credit Cards.

As other examples, users recognised various locations they could collect in-app vouchers from and demonstrated how they navigated to find and collect vouchers, indicating that the current voucher collection process was free of friction for users. However the users did not use the Wishlist function to save items they were interested in but not buying immediately. They preferred to add it to cart as it was more accessible to them.

Eye Tracking to assess findability of various app elements on the live eCommerce mobile app. The Eye Tracking tests were administered using Tobii Eye tracker. The eye tracking generated a lot of data and this data was later used to cross check and redesign the positioning and visual prominence of some elements on screen.

Online Focus Group Discussion to gather collective user preferences, attitudes and perspectives towards online shopping. The discussion topics were shared to participants in each country.

In order to clearly understand what end users were experiencing, researchers heavily used the UXArmy Usability Test recordings. They clipped footage of key user interactions and navigation journeys to edit video clips and switched them together to create Highlight reels on the UXArmy platform. Watching these 3 minute reels was easy for the stakeholders and with this shared understanding across teams, everyone in the company was on the same page. Watching user frustrations and confusion for themselves really made an impact by bringing the team together in a solution mindset.

For example, while viewing Search results, users disliked that the platform only shows 1 price and preferred how the platform’s competitor showed price ranges to indicate that there may be product variations at different prices within the same listing. UXArmy recommended to show the price range or add a “++” behind the price to indicate that there is a Base price but some item variations may cost more. This was specifically important for an extremely price sensitive market like Indonesia.

UXArmy research team synthesized insights to create a prioritized list of pain points and added initial recommendations for addressing each of those pain points. The insights also enabled the product teams to have a starting point to further design and implement those improvements with confidence.