Project Overview

Context

Alibaba.com is one of the world’s largest wholesale marketplaces, with 20 years of experience helping B2B companies buy and sell their goods around the world. The business is slowly transforming from an online yellow pages into an end-to-end transactional platform.  As part of that effort, Alibaba.com launched an ocean shipping service in 2018.  However, lack of data transparency and customer service issues led to low customer satisfaction, high dispute rates, and high attrition.

Challenge

As the team debated whether or not to prioritize this project, the Alibaba Supply Chain team announced a new partnership with Freightos, one of the world’s leading online freight shipping marketplaces. This collaboration provided an unparalleled opportunity to jump-start our work by infusing the power of Freightos’ quoting & comparison tools into our platform’s ordering experience.

Given these fortuitous circumstances, we set out to answer:

My role

I served as the lead designer for this project, partnering with Supply Chain team leaders in New York City and Hangzhou, China, to shape product & UX strategy. I directly contributed design work, while also supervising 3 designers distributed across the US and China.

Timeline

This initial MVP development of this project was completed between September and December 2019. Additional support and expansion to other areas of the Alibaba.com platform continued through June 2020.

Defining the opportunity

Although the previous ocean shipping service fell short, we had a wealth of data from the experiment to guide us as we re-imagined the product. I worked closely with our North America supply chain business lead to gather feedback from previous user research, customer service interactions, and sales cycle data.

With our understanding of the current buyer journey as a baseline, I created a journey map to better identify how the pain points we discovered could translate to product improvements.

This exercise enabled us to identify the following key opportunities for improvement:

Driving clear & widespread awareness earlier in the sourcing process

Better modeling the information needed to create a B2B order

Preventing post-sale issues & frequent confusion by providing more guidance up front

Digging in deeper

An incomplete understanding of our freight buyer base proved to be another key stumbling block that the 2018 product faced. With this in mind, the business lead and I identified a basic profile for our ideal Alibaba.com Freight customer – a business owner who places 8+ orders per year with an average order value of $10,000 USD. We aimed to cast a wide enough net to attract a strong subset of the platform’s user base, while remaining selective enough to ensure that subset was purchasing at a great enough volume to make freight shipping worthwhile.

With our new profile in hand, the UX research lead and I crafted a plan to further segment our target buyers using the jobs-to-be-done framework.  After fielding a survey with ~500 buyers and conducting 7 qualitative interviews, we identified two key groups with unique goals:

Design approach

Building a partnership

Since this project was such a huge undertaking from a business perspective and a product development perspective, our North America & China Headquarters supply chain leads felt strongly that we needed to establish trust via in-person collaboration to kick off our work.

We hosted our colleagues from Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and Jerusalem in our New York City office for a week-long workshop. During dedicated sessions, I shared our research findings and led whiteboarding exercises with my product, design, and business partners to determine the best way to leverage Freightos’ infrastructure and expertise to get started quickly.

Ensuring effective integration

After the workshop, I worked closely with our business lead and our PM lead to outline the journey and information exchange between all parties involved – buyers, sellers, Alibaba.com, and Freightos.

As a result of our discussions, I created process flow diagrams defining what technical processes and support services would take place via the Alibaba vs. Freightos platforms, plus what could be done via API vs. manually. I also noted key screens that would need to created or redesigned to accommodate these updates.

Pitching the ideal workflow

While our engineering partners started to lay the technical groundwork for connecting these systems, my business & product partners and I crafted a pitch for the future of freight quoting as a workflow fully integrated into the Alibaba.com buyer journey. Our goal was to demonstrate and get buy-in for the long-term vision at a leadership level, allowing us to start from an MVP and then build consensus across product teams over time to develop this future state.

We met at the Headquarters office in Hangzhou to present our strategy to the international heads of the Supply Chain and Buyer Journey product groups. I walked them through a design prototype that outlined the following key pillars of the experience:

Build in discovery points throughout the platform to create awareness

Collect shipping information early in sourcing experience

Gather more structured data from suppliers to enable instant freight quoting

Display quotes in Message Center for more seamless transition to placing an order

The presentation and resulting discussion were well-received, making the 8,000 mile journey well worth it, and we had the green light to put our ideas into action.

Implementing & iterating

Launching a scaled-down MVP

While we successfully got general buy-in for our long-term vision for the product, we needed to test demand for this new service with a simpler MVP before making a fuller investment. To do so, we designed and built entry points throughout the sourcing process while leveraging tried-and-true workflows from both Freights & Alibaba.

I worked with two Buyer Journey engineering teams to build entry points into the Product Details Page and Message center, ensuring effective on-platform discovery and driving buyers to the new Freight landing page for more details. To more easily get the service up and running, we co-created a white-labeled version of the Freightos quoting flow with their design & engineering teams.

Driving adoption with educational content

Since our ideal buyers were still relatively new to freight shipping, we aimed to be their source for educational content and their partner in taking their businesses to the next level. With our Content Strategy Lead as a key partner, the business lead and I developed comprehensive outreach & engagement strategy with the Alibaba.com supply chain and marketing teams.

We co-developed a content calendar with Freightos team and Alibaba.com supply chain team, with regularly scheduled emails & webinars to leverage their collective expertise. This enabled us to position ourselves as knowledgeable partners that could skillfully guide potential buyers through an often complex, daunting process.

Refining the requirements post-MVP

The MVP product and accompanying educational content got our flywheel started, but the real work started as we started collaborating with multiple product development teams to truly bake Alibaba.com Freight into the platform experience.

This included creating design concepts for:

• Embedding freight quoting throughout all sourcing entry points and within My Alibaba dashboard
• Moving all payment processing onto Alibaba.com
• Merging multiple providers into a single experience, maintaining quality UX and customer service

With these concepts in hand, we needed to meet with each of the 10+ product owners responsible for these screens to get their feedback and negotiate how & when to fit these updates into their engineering timelines.

Applying at scale

After aligning on the direction in the above designs, I worked with the designers on my team to ensure we had high-fidelity designs for every area of the product that needed updating.

After the PM lead and I reviewed & approved the designs, each designer then partnered with the product development teams responsible for that area of the platform to implement the updates. With our team being on opposite sides of the world, we made extensive use of asynchronous feedback and quickly got into a good rhythm with our round-the-clock design output.

Since the Alibaba.com platform did not have a unified design system at the time, our main goal was to ensure as much consistency as possible in the interaction patterns related to the Freight product, to offset the sometimes inconsistent UI look-and-feel.

Outcomes

Results & impact

Takeaways