SHOPEE

Duration

I was in Shopee's Marketplace BPM (Business Process Management) and Data Suite Team during my stint as an UI/UX Design Intern at Shopee.

Projects

14 September 2020 - 17 March 2023 (6 months)

Internship

Shopee has developed 16 SaaS products for internal usage. However, there is no design library for Shopee's SaaS products and product managers who wanted to improve the features of these products would face difficulties and confusion in finding components from SaaS' Figma files to do up their proposals. They would often retrieve instances from a large myriad of working files and may utilise components that are outdated or are no longer in use, which ultimately delayed the design workflow.

Thus, I worked on Shopee's design library and guidelines for their SaaS products to:

1) Guide product managers on how to utilise the components, and help them to source components easily for their proposals for new implementation or changes to SaaS product features

2) Provide convenience and reduce the amount of time needed for product designers to produce design solutions 

3) Reduce the amount of time needed for developers to implement the features by reusing code they have already created based on the design library

I analysed the user journey mapping of all 16 of Shopee's SaaS products and with reference to Ant Design, came up with several key components for Shopee's design library.

Marketplace BPM

I was also in Shopee's Marketplace BPM team where I collaborated with product designers, product managers, developers and the business team to deliver design solutions that fit their requirements. 

Reflection

I was really interested in joining Shopee as a UI/UX design intern as I believed that an internship at Shopee would provide me with invaluable experience and deeper insights into the tech and e-commerce industry. As Shopee is a multinational company present in many countries globally and is the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, I would get the chance to collaborate with many stakeholders such as product managers, product designers, business teams and developers from different regions, which is an important experience I believe product designers should have. Shopee was also known for its continuous learning culture and had its own learning and development team which provides employees with resources to upskill themselves constantly which made Shopee my number one choice for an internship.

I was extremely proud of myself for having joined Shopee as it was no easy feat. After extensive research, I found out that Shopee has an intense and rigorous hiring process. Not only that, I applied to Shopee when the company was undergoing restructuring and had several rounds of employee layoffs. Despite these factors, I challenged myself and got an immediate response from a Shopee recruiter for an interview internship. I went through several rounds of interviews and a design test which you may view HERE. I was very fortunate to be able to have this internship experience as an internship at Shopee is very highly sought after and I have benefitted immensely from this internship.

Despite being an intern, I was very treated equally as a full-time employee. I get assigned actual responsibilities and meaningful projects that contributed to the design workflow in Shopee. I was assigned two really wonderful mentors who were experts in their own fields who would share with me their design process and thoughts behind their design decisions. They were extremely nurturing which made it extremely comfortable to me to answer questions whenever I'm in doubt.

My Shopee Internship

Key Takeaways

As I spent most of my time in the Data Suite Team, I am most familiar with creating components and guidelines for Shopee's design library. I was taught to always put myself in the shoes of the users who would be using these components and to always think of how we can make our components intuitive and easy to interpret by the users. I was able to create key components such as buttons and tables and to come up with guidelines on how to use the components which are for actual use for product managers and designers. Thus, I am confident that I would be able to understand design libraries easily and how to better improve them in the future. Also, I got to experience collaborating with people from different departments, especially product managers, to come up with design solutions based on the PRD (Product Requirements Document). I often had to analyse many different e-commerce apps and have gained a lot of knowledge on how e-commerce apps and websites work which I believe would be beneficial knowledge for a digital product designer like myself.

Undeniably, one of the greatest takeaway would be the long-term friendships and relationships I have forged during my internship. My colleagues have been extremely welcoming and made it easy for me to fit in and have shared with me many of their life stories in the industry which gave me so much insights to help me plan my career path. My experience in Shopee has been a very fruitful one and I'm hopeful for where it takes me next.

Shopee App Skeleton Loading Design

Shopee 'Shop Ads'

Website Design - DD Traffic Management Portal

Analysing data from Product Managers (PMs)

As the data cannot be disclosed publicly, I will summarise what I deferred about users' behaviour regarding the Shop Ads as shown above:

1) In the seller information area, shop name/tagline has the highest CTR, followed by the shop logo and then the 'Visit Shop' button

2) The product card on the left would have the highest CTR while the product cards on the right would start having decreasing CTR

3) The right most product card would have the highest CTR only if it was a voucher

4) All users find the product price, ratings and reviews the most important when considering products in product cards

5) Mid Low SES users also find vouchers and the product image important when considering to purchase a product

6) Additionally, high SES find delivery information and the seller label important when considering to purchase a product

Competitor Analysis

I also analysed the Shop Ads of several similar/competitor apps and would be taking this in mind and for reference when I start my design exploration phase.

I decided to spend more time analysing the Shop Ads from Amazon as they ranked highly on both the IOS and Google Play Store and was not analysed before by my team.

Design Exploration

Direction 1

Direction 2

Direction 3

User Testing

It is important to perform user testing on designs to ensure there are no misinterpretations. As providing the delivery information is something new for Shopee's Shop Ads, I asked 5 regular users of Shopee how they interpreted the message and if they understand the message I was trying to convey.

When users load into the app with bad connection/slow or no internet, the skeleton loading would be displayed for the users. However, the pre-existing skeleton loading was inaccurate to the components that were meant to be displayed. Hence, I took the current UI of Shopee's app and turn every possible element into a more accurate skeleton loading for a better user experience, before passing it onto the development team.

The DD Traffic Management Portal are often used and receive requests by local ops and business lines to allocate traffic. Users have raised their pain points while using this portal.

The objective of this project is:

1) Build a new mechanism of traffic allocation between several stakeholders

2) Improve the traffic allocation efficiency for target audience and uplift key metrics

3) Improve the development efficiency of users and reduce the cost of repeated construction through platform building