✦ Other Works
✻ Overview
Role : Interaction Designer (UX)
Team Collaborator : Visual Designer, Product Manager, Community Manager, Engineers
Contribution : Leading qualitative research (research plan, executing, synthesizing and reporting), concepting (low-fidelity), leading & facilitating workshops
Company : Traveloka
Project Background
As a food discovery platform, Traveloka EATS relies on the power of our users to create reviews that will help others discover the best food. We believe that all categories of users qualify as potential creators due to the rise of the internet platform, yet only a small percentage of users create content. As such, it requires us to develop a cohesive strategy by first understanding users’ needs and pain points around content creation to identify the untapped opportunity.
Project Goal
Improve our content ecosystem and create a delightful experience that will help drive the base of passionate users to sustainably generate content.
How Design Plays an Important Role
Design plays a significant role in both the discovery and development phases. In this project, I discovered that not everything is a total blackout. I found a low-hanging fruit area where design was mainly used as a curation tool — to narrow down ideas based on what I already know. On the other side, I also tried to dive deep into the other unknown areas and came up with a side experimental project where I had the privilege to explore and make some trial errors to gain early feedback.
My Contribution
This was my first project in Traveloka after I pivoted my role from a mere researcher to an interaction designer. As an interaction designer, my job is to conduct product research and transform it into a solid product concept and flow. I gained trust in this project to spearhead the research process under my lead’s supervision. I was responsible for crafting the research plan from scratch — from making the interview guidelines to developing the research report. As a first-timer product person, I also had my first experience crafting the low-fidelity concept, where I had the chance to experiment with the ideation process with other teammates.
Identifying Issues
To really understand users’s pain points and find a relevant opportunity area, I ran a qualitative research to some content creators and conducted a profound analysis of our current flow and features to see how they conflicted with our recent research findings. Later, I analyzed and combined findings from those two processes to came up with user journey frameworks, insights and concept solution.
Conducting workshops to get ideas and feedbacks
To ensure the feasibility of our solution and eliminate designers' bias, I invited the product managers and engineers to critique the existing proposal while building ideas on top of it. I walked them through the proposed product flow to better understand the context before providing feedback. Having a dedicated sharing session with engineers would also help them gain more clarity during the later development phase.
Outcome
Improved our in-app food review submission based on research insights. I added a new entry point for users to easily create reviews without having to go through each restaurant page and enhanced the content creation experience by providing more touch points for guidelines and review.
On the other side.. One of the key pillars from the research insight was also used as a foundation to develop an experimental concept for our product: food social network, where users are enabled to create more advanced food content and connect with like-minded people. The details can't be disclosed due to an NDA, but you can directly reach out to me for more information about this project.
Impact
Challenges
This was my first attempt to spearhead foundational research from scratch. I wanted to invite the cross-functional teams to join us during the analysis because they were highly involved in the research process. To make things more effective, I set up a dedicated war room to document all of our work and split into teams to ignite smaller discussions first. This would eventually make the latter discussion more effective as each team member had already gained an initial understanding of the ideas.
The purpose of having a cross-functional critique is to evaluate whether or not it meets technical feasibility, business objectives, and user needs. It's important to gatekeep the discussion and provide a clear expectation of what to achieve before the sharing session (especially because we’ll always come up with a half-baked design first to reduce the iteration effort).
Learnings
Don't become too obsessed with the process and the product itself. Instead, focus on delivering value quickly to the market and receiving real feedback from users. Everything you've learned from research isn't 100% correct until it's used by the users.
When you're working in a business-driven company, nothing gets developed for free, and a great concept alone won't make the cut. Good design should find the sweet spot between business objectives and user needs.
✦ Team Credits
Credit to our design lead, Edmund Goh, for supervising and trusting me to lead the research process. To our product manager, Praz Perkasa, for his total dedication and direct involvement in each research process. Also, to our community manager, Kartika Dyan, for paving the way to connect with the food community. And last but not least, Hilmy Fawwazy for his assistance and significant contribution in transforming the product concept into a well-polished prototype. Great teamwork!