Seller Home

Problems

According to research, we found that Tokopedia sellers can’t optimize the seller dashboard. Given the facts that:

1. Seller dashboard home performance is very low, below 10% of active sellers visit the page and on a daily average, the active sellers only visit 1-2 times and spend 6 minutes in a day.
2. Merchant has very low intention due to no clear value proposition to visit the dashboards.
3. Unclear structure from a few key sections of the Homepage.

And also we found problem from our development team that usually needs more effort in every improvement because they always build new components that can not be reusable.

Research

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Understanding User and Needs

User
We classified sellers into 2 segments. The first segmentation based on seller membership, such as: Regular Merchant, Power Merchant, and Official Store. And other segmentation based on seller revenue (TPV).

User Behaviour
Form the analytics we found that type of membership has no significant difference of insight. And the hypotheses are the lower tier, the more time will be spent on shop setting and add product, lower tier more focus on how to get transaction and  attract buyer. and the higher tier, the more time will be spent on order, pusat resolusi, and chat,higher tier more focus on how to minimize complaints & improve transaction quality.

*) Some of user data can not be show here, because of confidential information

Workshop and Survey

Workshop
Then we conducted a workshop with relevant stakeholders including products and businesses from Regular, Power Merchants and Official Stores.  Collecting all seller points of view by used this pattern:
I need to [Seller’s needs] because [Insight / data]
Connecting the dots using the affinity diagram. We created an affinity map as a group to identify themes from our hypothesis.

Survey
After collecting hypotheses, then we conduct a survey to the sellers. We choose active seller segmentation by TPV as our target audience in Indonesia. We used survey method to 1) help us narrow down our target user group and 2) quickly learn about the most important user needs and the pain points seller when selling and manage day to day operations.

Key Takeaways

Based on the workshop & survey results, we found the seller’s needs and pain points can be resolved on the seller’s dashboard home.

Comparative Analysis

We conduct competitive analysis with the other competitors. The process aims to understand who the competitors are, their strategy, the strengths and weaknesses of their products in comparison to ours so as to improve our design solutions.

This is only the highlight of comparison result

Define

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Ultimate Seller Home Vision

We realize that the seller’s needs are very different compare with others, and even in the future it will grow. to facilitate them, so we have an ultimate vision to build a personalized dashboard to answer all the sellers’ needs. But to lead that vision, we need a lot of data to know what really matters for our sellers by building a platform that can be customized. From that, we can track and learn the seller’s behavior.

Starting with the Basic

Problem Statements:

1. Ease of maintaining seller’s daily task
2. Ease of monitoring shop/ product quality and the sales performance
3. Build a scalable design for the development phase

Ideation

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Card Sorting

At the ideation stage, we list all seller features and group them by seller’s task. We use this method for discovering how people understand and categorize information. We try to think as a seller, with the following steps :

• find out how our sellers expect to see the information grouped by their basic daily task
• discover and compare how sellers understand different concepts or ideas
• get people to rank or arrange items based on set criteria

The results is a priority matrix and list of the most important tasks displayed on the homepage based on seller survey insight and analytics.

Design Solution: Seller Home Hierarchy of Needs

Here is the seller’s basic needs which are divided into 4 main pillars. Including daily activities, performance monitoring, growing business, and support education. This basic need become a foundation to define what information is in the seller’s home.

Design

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Design Sprint

Working together in a sprint, together we make ideations, validate ideas and solve big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. The participants include the product, business, and tech teams.

Design concept

1. Breaking down into widgets to be able to provide high relevance to merchants, Homepage has to be broken down into multiple widgets. This concept aims to prepare a customization seller home concept: order and content of each component then can be adjusted to fit the current state of the merchants. Understanding the stages and action required by the merchant, they will be presented most relevant information depends on the situation.
2. Breaking down Widgets then further broken into components, a widget can consist of one or multiple components that can enhance scalability and flexibility for further development while at the same time maintaining consistent looks and feels in seller dashboard.
3. Providing guiding principles, as a platform, Dashboard will provide standardization that any other products/ services. This includes user experience as well as reliability requirements. The products/ services offered to merchants through the dashboard also consider the life cycle of the merchant. Dashboard Home will be the gatekeeper to these incoming new integration from other respective team/feature in the future.

Wireframe and Prototype

After the design sprint, I started to translate it into wireframes, user flow, and high-fidelity design. I also create a design guideline

Widget guideline created to build a clear principles according to user needs, standardise usage, maintain consistency and experience. And also help the scalability for future improvement. Following is a guideline that we made for the further improvement.

High Fidelity Design

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Desktop Preview

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Mobile Preview

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Results

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After 1 month launched, we always monitor the performance. In the early stage seller home dashboard has shown better performance. We focus on retention and engagement metrics, showing that the number of DAU (Daily Active Users) in January increase from 10% to 40% of users and the average CTR (Number of clicks) for each widget is more than 50% and especially for orders it reaches 90%. From here we know that, the initial stage results were a good start and it was proven that the basic needs were very helpful for our sellers.

And currently, some improvements have been made for the ultimate version without eliminate the fundamental concepts. And the concept of widgets and components has been applied to almost 60% of the entire dashboard, not only on the home page. This solution has proven to be more scalable, saving much effort and development time better than before.

*) All screenshoots were captured in January 2020, my contribution end at February 2020.
currently Seller Home Tokopedia already done some iterations.

Learnings

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A never end project
This is a project that has given me my tools for communicate with stakeholders whose backgrounds are very different from me. The interview muscles that I trained there have been helping me to deliver every ideas better than before.

Tapping into how companies support research has also become an ongoing project of my passion, especially when the challenge involves complex organizational structures and multiple audiences.
Also from this project I understand that the basic needs must be truly defined for the first foundation before jumping to the solutions. Because solutions can come with many choices, but the biggest mistake is when we solve the wrong problem(it’s too late).