I was working as a User Experience Designer at Yonghui Yunchuang Techonology within the product design team, mainly worked on the user experience design of the Yonghui Life App and the Yonghui Life WeChat Mini Program. I also worked directly with product managers and user experience researchers on online/offline user research, data analysis, competitive analysis and usability testing.During my period of stay, I contributed to:

In today’s consumer-driven arena, many traditional retailers, Yonghui included, are actively transforming to cater to the needs of modern consumers. Yonghui needs to understand the essence of transformation in the “New Retail” era and intends to encourage its customers to order online and/or to pay with the APP in stores. In this case, from the perspective of UX designers, we’re facing the following challenges:

Research Period: Feb. 3. 2018 – Feb. 12. 2018

Research Period: Feb. 28. 2018 – March. 12. 2018

I. QUESTIONNAIRE SURVEY:

All 9800 copies of the response to our online questionnaires were collected, 253 invalid responds were cleaned. The actual sample size is 9547. (Feb. 28 — Mar. 4)

II. DATA ANALYSIS:
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We processed the data collected from our questionnaire responds in IBM SPSS software mainly with Cross Table Analysis and Cluster Analysis. We tried to create an overall online customer persona represented as core customer for all Yonghui business, as well as personas of each of the main three business in Yonghui: Yonghui Membership Store (also called Yonghui life), Bravo YH and Super Species.‍

III. DATA VISUALIZATION:
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After collecting and processing data, we created charts and diagrams for each of the three Yonghui businesses respectively. Following diagrams demonstrate the gender, age, marriage status, education background, career, income, city, interests, reasons for choosing Yonghui, preferred products, online shopping frequency, online shopping category and in-store shopping frequency of our customers.

IV. ONLINE CUSTOMER PERSONAS:
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We created a general persona as an office lady presented as the core customer of all Yonghui businesses. Retired women and students for YH Life; young moms and rich bachelors for YH Super Species; junior employees, housewives, self-employees and students for Bravo YH.

I. FOR ONLINE PLATFORM DESIGN

Our team had a better understanding of who we are designing for after the user research.

i. Since not all our users are familiar with online shopping process, and some users reflected that they could not get immediate online support because the service hotline was always busy, so we decided to launch an online customer service center.

ii. According to the personas, we decided to redesign the landing page as well as the categories lists of each different business.

iii. In order to gain new users, we should find a way to encourage current users to share the App/Mini Program with their friends, and improve the online sharing experience.

I. FIRST ATTEMPT: MEET THE BASIC REQUIREMENTS OF A CUSTOMER SERVICE CENTER

Our users reflected frequently that they could not get help in time since our service call was always busy. At the same time, our customer services team reflected that advisors working in their team had way too many phone calls to answer due to the missing of FAQs pages.

I was in charge of the prototyping of our new Customer Service Center. Basically, what users expect for an online customer center are:

Based on those two needs, I created the first sketch as following to demonstrate the basic wireframes of the Customer Service Center:

‍* 1. Simplified Chinese is the original working language, contents were translated for demonstration purpose only
* 2. Contents for display purpose only

II. OBSERVATIONS: WAY TOO COMPLEX!

After discussions with project managers and UI Designers, new observations came up, and I concluded them into two main points:

III. ITERATION: SIMPLIFY THE STRUCTURE

I made the following changes to the initial wireframes:

· Combine the “FAQs” and “Browse All Help Topics” sections

‍· Use icons to enhance usability and improve the design of the homepage

· Adjust the navigation when clicked on the “Go back to Last Page” buttons and “Close Page” buttons

We decided to launch the ‘pay with your face’ service in Shanghai first using the latest facial recognition technology. The payment process doesn’t require a smartphone, assuming that the customer has already signed up for our app and enabled facial recognition. A 3D camera located at the point-of-sale scans the customer’s face to verify their identity, while there is a phone number verification option for additional security.

I. HOW IT WORKS: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

I was in charge of the prototyping of the design fo the Face Recognition Payments system, which requires users to sign up for our App, set up their facial appearance, enabled facial recognition and authorized face recognition payments.

* 1. Simplified Chinese is the original working language, contents were translated for communication purpose only
* 2. Contents for display purpose only

Based on what we found in user researches, our team found that we could apply promotions to encourage current users to share our App and Mini Program with their friends to gain new users. So we started to modify the online sharing section.

I. FIRST STEP: UNDERSTANDING SHARING SCENARIOS

The red packet sharing section will show up under two situations:· After a user makes a payment.· When a user check the detail of his active orders.When I was working on the prototyping of this feature, I mainly focused on these aspects:

II. PROTOTYPE: AFTER A SUCCESSFUL PAYMENT

‍When users complete a payment successfully, the WeChat Red Packet Sharing Section will show up.

‍* 1. Simplified Chinese is the original working language, contents were translated for communication purpose only
* 2. Contents for display purpose only

III. PROTOTYPE:  WHEN CHECK ACTIVE ORDERS

When users check their active orders , the WeChat Red Packet Sharing Section will show up.

‍* 1. Simplified Chinese is the original working language, contents were translated for communication purpose only
* 2. Contents for display purpose only

As a UX designer in Yonghui Yunchuang Technology, it was the first time that I worked on O2O (Offline to Online) product. It was a challenging but exciting journey started from deep and comprehensive user researches to design:

I was interested in observing people of a wide range of ages, and studying their behaviors and different attitudes towards a same product. I struggled with the analysis of near 10,000 copies of data sheets, but at the same time, I also enjoyed all the enlightened moment during the process of creating narratives from those data. I tasted the fun of working in a brilliant team with project managers, user researchers, UX designers and UI designers. I struggled with methods to represent all the information in a clear way when I was prototyping for a new feature, but I learnt a lot during the whole journey.

During the four months, I spent a lot of time working directly with UX Researchers and UX Designer in our team. This experience was unique since:

1. This time I was facing a huge groups of customers aged from 18- to 90+ with various education backgrounds, incomes, living environment, interests, shopping habits, etc. We do not have a specific group of people to be considered as “target users”, which makes the research quite hard. Under this situation, I gained the ability how to narrow the scope and dig deeper into user behaviors study by classifying users according to a certain dimension that the research is focused on.

2. Design a single platform for a large technology company which has several business that similar in services modes but different in marketing strategies is a challenge for me to catch the point where to focus. From this research experience, I learnt the importance of defining and having a comprehensive understanding of core users of each business before jumping into any design solutions.

3. Working with people from diverse fields inspired me a lot in the perspectives of looking at a single product. In order to create designs that make sense under a development environment, I started to teach myself basic coding languages for better communicating with engineers. Besides, I spent more time reading articles related to cognitive science, psychology and sociology, trying to learn more about human behaviors and human society.