Project
Overview



According to Tipper's sales data, 90 percent of the sales was from campaign collaborations between publishers and merchants. Therefore, we decided to focus on campaigns and facilitate the collaborations between publishers and merchants in our product strategy.


I was missioned to carry out user research regarding their collaboration experience and come up with product design solutions to address the problems. The outcome was to create features that help both publishers and merchant to discovery, connect, and collaborate with their counterparts. For the first phase of this series of product development, we decided to build the base first, which is merchant pages that enable publishers to discovery merchants, making it easy for publishers to discover and collaborate with merchants that meet their criteria.


As the solo product designer at Tipser, I was responsible for all user research, product design, and usability testing of the project.



Touchpoints &
Userflow Map



Starting the project with conducting qualitative research: in-depth user interviews with internal and external stakeholders to understand and empathize with their experiences of the merchant-publisher collaboration process as this project is a segment of it.


Historically, publishers discover merchants and find the right ones that meet their criteria to collaborate through touchpoints outside Tipser’s platform. With help of the qualitative research I mapped out current userflows and touchpints of the manual merchant discovery process to have a better understanding of what cause the frictions that stakeholders mentioned in the interviews, as well as what other tools or methods they use to find the right merchants.


Through the mapping exercise I learned that the discovery process requires two mental modes: exploration, an expansive activity, and evaluation, a reductive activity. This finding helped shape the product a lot.



User Jouney
Map



To make the qualitative research data easier to digest for all, I created a user journey map of the entire collaboration process, dividing it into four phases: discovery, dialogue, collaboration, and bond based on the research.


The top level finding is that the merchant discovery process is rather manual and full of frictions, which in return give publishers a bad user experience. We would like to resolve this problem by providing relevant merchant information within the publisher portal.


In order to provide publishers with relevant merchant information, I need to find out what information is being considered as important for publishers in the merchant evaluation process. I have included this part in the in-depth stakeholder interviews. It gave me a good foundation to build the quantitative research on.



Quantitative
Research



Previous qualitative research gave me a good understanding of what information is being considered important in the evaluation process, but as a designer I want to take it further with a quantitative research; by sending out questionnaire to our publishers. In order to get as much response as possible, I also sent out an equivalent questionnaire to our internal team members who work closely with publishers.


I also brought engineers to the discussion in a early stage. On one hand, it helps me to have a better understanding of our technology constrains; on the other hand, it allows engineers to contribute on a early stage, and be able to put proper structures in place before polished designs are completed.


Based on the results of the survey and our internal evaluation with PM and Eng we managed to narrow it down to a much shorter list of merchant information.



Userflow



Our current product discovery pages support publishers to search, or using filters to find products that they would like to sell. However, it generated less sales when compared to campaign collaborations.


As the product was shifting away from a product-first discovery approach to a merchant-first approach, we need to make sure the new merchant discovery pages will be complementary to the the already existing product discovery pages. When these three distinctive yet complementary pages combined together, they could provide our publishers with a hussle-free product discovery experience.



Wireframe &
Low Fidelity Design



Infographic
Design



When it comes to infographic design, it’s about finding the best way to visualize the most important data to the right audiences.


In the price distribution chart of this project, not only I want to display the product price distribution of a merchant, but also its comparison to the entire inventory, making it easier for publishers to evaluate a merchant. I started by finding 3 of our live merchants to represent low-end, meddle-end, and high-end merchants in the inventory to make sure the infographic chart will work for all. In order to find a more optimal method to visaulize merchants’ data, I explored using arithmetic progression and geometric progression on x axis and y axis, finding the best way to make full use of the space is using geometric progressions in on both x and y axes.



Grid System



High Fidelity
Design



Type



UX/UI design


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Team



Solo in-house design project



My role



Design research, Lo-fi design, Hi-fi design, prototyping, usability testing.