As a Creative Web Director, I collaborated closely with producers and inspired fellow directors to shift the focus; to engage the real audience — the shoppers.
The standard for featured genre pages in Japan’s massive online mall was to merely display a grid of products without much context. To challenge this status quo, I collaborated closely with producers to:
Prior to collaboration, clicking on a product on a feature page took users to search results using the product name as the keyword, which meant users would be faced with thousands of merchant results but no further information on the product. Instead, we started to make sure that clicking on a product takes users to the product description followed by a list of online shops within its mall that it can be purchased from.
To help reduce the dilemma of choice that is apparent in a massive online mall, a select few recommended products were featured on campaign pages along with their unique characteristics to help with decision making.
The mall's mobile content consisted of a single list of products on sale regardless of what the desktop counterpart displayed. In order to enable mobile users to engage in the same way as desktop users, mobile pages were designed to mirror its desktop counterpart.
To make this happen, detailed coding briefs were shared with developers to communicate how each element shall translate to mobile devices. The coding brief also included granular front-end specifications so that future editing of content would not require a designer and coder. (e.g. avoiding text and buttons as images, separating the background from the foreground, avoiding inline styling.)
This paved way for templating, and enabled serialisation of featured and topical pages.
In order to not affect the normal operations of the web department, all projects were completed in a normal 2-week campaign page creation cycle that usually only require product item updates. The process and outcome were featured in director meetings to educate and continue the trend of putting the buyers at the centre of designs.
Different product categories were owned by different producers. To spread design thinking, I collaborated with many producers owning various categories. Getting projects featured in producer meetings raised other producers’ expectations about their future projects, and inspired fellow directors to create feature pages that engage customers through the use of strategic content and layouts.
