AliExpress and Mail.ru Group Cooperation

eCommerce
+Social

AliExpress is the # 1 eCommerce in Russia.
VK is the # 1 social network in Russia. 

146 million population in Russia

 
Date

Dec – Jul 2018-2019

Role

Lead Product Designer

Team

AE UED team

VK UX team

Understanding the Context

AliExpress:

A large number of VK.com users do not buy on AliExpress.com.

Goal: reach out to new users 20% of VK.com or more.

20% GMV comes from social media platforms. Users and social media share links to earn a commission.

Trend – grow feed to purchase conversion rate 25% or more. 

VKontakte:

VK.com (social network) wanted to create an e-commerce experience to leverage its revenue.

Biz objectives

  • Share a huge number of high-quality products supplied by AE & TaoBao Sellers (40M+1B).
  • Integrate VK Pay into AE Payment.
  • Support the whole buying process (View/Order/Purchase) in VK App directly.
  • Provide a product search tool to VK users. (Filter/Likes/ Category/Price/Product/Sale QTY, etc.)

Users objectives

  • Native buyer experience
  • Strong and reliable data security
  • 1-tap payment
  • Personalized feed suggestion of AliExpress.com products 

Product road map

In the first stage by brainstorming and prioritizing ideas in terms of efficiency (“How can we make our internal processes or the processes within our products or services more efficient?”) and awareness (“What can we do to be seen?”). However, the process required the agreement between top management, legal teams, and the technical ability of all the parties.

Create a win-win E-commerce Ecosystem

Team collaboration

We had to work and plan in a very agile manner. From the very beginning of the concept formation, we had short sprints, reviews with biz, dev, and support teams.

The project had many stakeholders in China and Russia. In the process of localization, and I took the initiative to coordinate a cross-cultural team based in both China and Russia, and served as the cultural, technical, and communications link between the two teams.

Who are the users?

Generally, we had two types of users who were familiar with AE and who never purchase from AE. Why it’s important? Those who knew AE were more loyal. Those who didn’t buy from AE had a controversial image. To engage them we must provide a simple compelling experience.

Better design process + more transparency

While forming the user flow I collaborated together with the UX team in China who was in charge of check out, detail page, and other specifics steps of the user journey on AliExpress. 

After interviewing the subjects, I synthesized the research, together we mapped out the user journey and added streams for pain points, data points, and opportunities.

Together with product and design, we created a paper prototype to make the process transparent for all XFN partners. 

We had 5 hours time zone difference, it was important to have a big picture.

All those concepts were formed in the first App concept and presented to Daniel Zhang (CEO of Alibaba Group)

The user journey

The entrance into AE Mini-App, login, homepage, product detail page.

The most challenging task for me as a designer was to create a transition from social experience to e-commerce experience.

VK ID

The next challenge was to create a Single Shopper ID that can help to enrich user profiles. In the first case help them to enter the app with existed AE account without registration. In the second case simply create a new AE account based on VK. From the business, perspective Single Shopper ID will help to understand the user’s preferences and improve targeting while exchanging product best practices and expertise.

Example: user starting with consuming content through newsfeed and shops natively within the social networks. Data Enrichment and Single ID.

Product and image search

Searching by image, by detecting different kinds of items, can also provide more features.

Advanced Usability Testing

In our next design sprint, we prototyped a mid-fidelity app and focused on helping the user make confident choices. After another round of testing, we iterate and refine our prototype.

The user data privacy agreement didn’t allow full API service communication. For example; User authentication happened inside AE code base. VK mini-app operated as a mobile app inside another mobile app, rather than the API+thin client. Because of that some of the UX/UI design solutions were not easy to implement, or even not possible. I started to collaborate closely with cross-functional teams from a very early stage.

Login

Log in part was pretty challenging from the technical point of view, in addition, in the future, we planned integration with VK Pay. UX/UI has been rethink many times before we came to the end one.

Product detail page

We wanted to overcome the complexity of the original AE App. What was hard to change on the platform before was easy to make right in the new product. Our internal user’s research indicates that consumers tend to pay a lot of attention to review, they do need an open product description on the first screen. Original App used to have problems with information hierarchy.

Tracking Order

By user research, we knew that the tracking page leaves users frustrated with unclear delivery times. For example, “Wish.com” and “Joom.com” have the same delivery time, but detailed shipping progress brings more confidence to users. I convinced Product and Dev to improve the interface. Create an info hierarchy, increase accessibility.

As a result, users spend less time on the page trying to understand what happened to their order.

Order

The order page had a special requirement, it depended on our logistic and main AE app. We can’t easily update or change the page design because check-out was a third-party application. However,

Result

It was the first stage of the AE Mini-App, however, the App continued to be developed by AE and VK teams.

During the first interaction has been made hundreds of prototypes and concepts which is not possible to show. Some of the insides helped the team to improve the main AE App.

— User experience. Improved information hierarchy on the product page, significantly simplifies the UX from the original AE.

— integration into the list of projects in the left column leading to the AE product within MRG ecosystem (VK app, a page with a personalized feed, etc)

— Improved user retention. Track users purchase triggers and take them back to the shopping experience optimally

The App is still up and running can be found through VK App in My account=>Services=>AliExpress App.