Tailored livestream social commerce solutions for retail sectors.
Maneki is a social commerce tool that delivers savvy solutions and turns social media into an online marketplace. With just one click, retailers can easily start selling goods and receiving orders while social live streaming.
Launch an omni-store management system that helps retailers simplify and streamline the process of livestream shopping for both shoppers and sellers, keeping the orders rolling in, gaining new customers, and maximising revenue.
Although the project eventually got put on hold due to client’s priorities change, the anticipated outcome would be seen in two areas: accelerating conversion and improving audience engagement. It was expected to result in real lift in conversion rate by 30% with a 50% engagement rate.
It’s becoming a phenomenon that the power of social commerce in social media has a strong influence on driving purchases. There are 1.73 billion daily active users on Facebook as of 1st quarter 2020 [i]. In addition, out of the 1 billion Instagram users, 90% of them follow at least one business account [ii]. It suggests that users find social media as a viable platform for purchasing and discovering new products and services or brands. Overtime, social media has become a new marketing and communications channel for businesses, because it allows people easily interact with others and also provides various ways for businesses to reach and engage with consumers.
Specifically, livestream shopping on social media such as Facebook live has become popular as it includes live video content, entertainment, two-way interactions, and the ability for viewers to shop directly from the platform. For businesses, livestream shopping comes with a lot of benefits, including increased customer engagement, reduced customer consideration period, and higher sales conversions. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has a significant influence on online consumer behaviours and the buyer journey that accelerated e-commerce adoption and continued growth. While millions of people stayed home in early 2020, digital channels have become the most popular shopping alternatives — a better way to shop from home.
However, the upsurge of livestream shopping also further increased immense pressure on business owners. Businesses need to learn new methods to engage customers. Some of them have no idea how to host a quality and effective livestream shopping event. Some have trouble promoting their event to increase livestream views and following up afterwards. Is there any way to track customer data and monitor business performance? Besides, it is also challenging to keep inventory levels accurate and synced across multichannel platforms.
How can we help businesses track their success and optimise for their next livestream event?
The issues that businesses faced are a bottleneck in the livestream shopping process. Throughout the project, we conducted market and competitive research to better understand the root cause of the pain points, the needs and the gaps of the growing space. Also, we initiated multiple surveys and interviews with prospective users to ensure building a product that simplifies the overall process and most importantly meeting business requirements.
We conducted a competitive analysis to evaluate both direct and indirect competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, in order to understand existing patterns, identify areas of improvement, and also to find the gap in the market.
As the project is based on a B2B2C (business to business to consumer) business model, so we prepared two types of surveys, one is for potential business customers and the other is for end-users, and shared the surveys with people at related social network groups and potential users. In the survey of business customers, we had 26 valid respondents, while the other consisted of 236 respondents of end-users. Below is a summary of the key findings from the survey responses.
Building on a general understanding of the market and audience, we continued to dive deeper to gain direct insights from primary research. We conducted several interviews with 6 participants who actively used livestream selling and 5 prospective users to know more about their motivations, pain points, and needs. To know more about:
The user interviews revealed 6 key insights:
To define the problem, we use How-Might-We (HMW) Questions to frame the ideation in the research phase for solutions.
Issues:
HMW:
With the above HMW questions, we listed the goals for the project that will serve as a guide for the development of the product and the rubrics for assessing what features to include in our services.
Then we brainstormed potential features and made a list of product features to build a comprehensive product roadmap. These features were prioritised based on user needs identified during the research phase and how they can help achieve business goals and user goals, including Must-Have (P1), Nice-to-Have (P2), Surprising and Delightful (P3), and Can-Come-Later (P4) features.
This feature roadmap help up map out the direction of our the product, align the vision with project goals, and most importantly, prioritise the most viable and important features in the development cycle.
After mapping out the scope and setting up the project goals, I built up a site map of Maneki to better organise the structure, examine hierarchy and visualise the relationships between contents.
I mapped out user flows based on the MVP Maneki needed to attained:
The user flows put us in the users’ shoes and also made us think through multiple scenarios. Plus, it offers a more comprehensive look into the product and help determine what features and pages we would need to cover for the users to complete their tasks.
After the user flow is synthesised, I started the wireframe process with hand drawn low-fidelity sketches that users would need to complete the tasks. Once having a clear vision and idea, the sketches were digitised into mid-fidelity wireframes by adding more details. It enabled me to focus on the visual hierarchy and layout, and at the same time keep in mind common design patterns.
UI design was developed in an iterative design process. Through usability testing and feedback from stakeholders, each iteration intend to reduce usability issues and create optimal user experiences. We conducted usability testing by using a mid-fidelity prototype, which is effective for identifying real issues and getting feedback before spending too much time on designing details.
Once the testing plan (including test objectives, methodology, participants, and tasks) was set up, we conducted an in-person usability testing with 5 intended audience. 3 participants have used similar products before while 2 of them have interested in using our services.
Scenario:
1. Find an event called "Halloween Party" you built previously and you want to start livestreaming the event.
Task1 : Find a livestream event "Happy Halloween" and activate it.
2. Access the product called "Magic Cat Teaser" and change the keyword for ordering from "C01" to "Cat01".
Task 2: Change the ordering keyword of a particular product.
3. Check the purchase orders of a livestream event "Meow Party", which was held last month.
Task 3: Check the orders and performance of an livestream event.
The usability testing results effectively help us to find patterns and frustrations while users interact with the prototype, and furthermore identify areas of improvements depending on priority levels.
Brand design was taking place concurrently with the wireframing process. I started by making a mood board for gathering multiple inspirations and also establishing project alignment among team members. The key attributes of the branding were:
The brand’s name is inspired by “招き猫 (まねきねこ)" in Japanese, so I started by experimenting with the cat’s character and tuned the tone base on the brand's attributes and personality. I firstly sketched out a number of ideas. Next, we carried out 3 iteration review sessions before making the final design decisions.
In the design process, I found out that the cat’s image was too complicated as a brand’s logo, so I decided to simplified the cat into a collar bell. In this way, it made the logo more visually impactful and more modern. On the other hand, the image resembles Doraemon's Bell, conveying the brand’s vibe of innovative, playful and resourceful.
Subsequently, I developed the Style Tile of Maneki, including the logo variations, colour palette, typography and imagery. It servers as design deliverables that conceptualise visual directions for the following high-fidelity screens.
UI kit is a collection of user interface components and resources for maintaining brand consistency and making design workflow processes better across the team. Especially, it is a living document that will be updated in iteration.
High-fidelity wireframes were created based on the research, branding, and the insights from usability testing. Moreover, It also followed the above UI kit style guideline to make the overall screens and aesthetics consistent.
Maneki aimed to provide a social commerce solution for businesses, helping brands and merchants primarily in two areas: accelerating conversion and improving audience engagement. It promote an increase in sales, conversions and audience engagement, which results in increased brand recognition and a higher rate of repeat customers. Upon completion of the project, the expected results would be the following:
The project took about half a year to ideate, design, test and implement, which was a great learning experience for me and the entire Maneki team. I am always passionate about providing solutions to real life issues. I believe that I have met the goals outlining in the beginning of the project, with the final prototype created and branding materials encapsulated the core value of the service.
After the design has been tested and revised, it then entered the development phase. Our final designs were handed over to a contract developer team. I created a Figma document with all the details and assets required for developers to bring the product to life. Specifically, we had a meeting to walk through each deliverable during handoff. However, this phase didn’t go as smoothly as expected. Although adopting an agile testing approach to identify defects and fix the errors early in the development process, the output hasn’t turned out as well as anticipated. The testing and QA process were time-consuming and required a long period to iterate as the code was not properly reviewed before deployment. Due to the delays in the product development cycle and similar products launched by new competitors, such as Shopline, our client (also the product owner) decided to change the objectives and put the project on hold.
Designing the entire product from branding to multiple touch points (sites for sellers and shoppers, Email design for shoppers, plus a the landing page website) was an exciting and challenging process. I was glad to work on this SaaS product, and truly enjoyed the process of strategising user flows, UX/UI designing and user interactions. The key takeaways are:
