Using design to increase conversion rate by 31%! How did Alibaba’s experts do it?

When it comes to innovation, I wonder if you have ever felt confused: you feel lost when it comes to innovating in the projects you work on every day, and you don’t know where to start. You are like looking for nails with a hammer. You have good technical support, but it is difficult to find a suitable landing scenario, and you cannot realize the value of technology through design.

This article mainly uses the Shang+Live project as an example to talk about how to think, promote and implement innovation. (Note: The Shang+Live project is an Internet TV shopping platform that mainly serves small and medium-sized enterprises. It is a "light e-commerce" shopping guide marketing model.)

Table of Contents

• Differentiated innovation in design ideas
• Professional innovation in the design process
• Intelligent innovation in design development
• Summarize

Differentiated innovation in design ideas

1. A change in consciousness leads to a change in roles

Business designers need to stay focused on the company’s strategy and make good designs available through commercial dissemination (online) so that more people can see and use them, thereby expanding the value of the design. This is a high-level requirement for business designers.

For example, Alibaba is a "customer first" company. Designers can use the "customer first" value to remind themselves whether they are making plans from the user's perspective or dealing with problems from the business perspective.

Let me give you another example: The company’s “Five New Strategies” lists new technologies as an important part. With the support of cutting-edge technology capabilities such as the DAMO Academy Laboratory, when we are designing, have we thought about which new technologies can be incorporated to help solve problems?

Designers cannot work in isolation, but should pay attention to the overall environment and look ahead. We can also give full play to our subjective initiative and transform from being executors who simply accept demands to product drivers who can independently initiate demands.

2. Insight into user pain points and design solutions at scale

Observe and analyze the user's pain points, solve them, optimize them, and make them functional and productized. I believe many designers have already done this. In fact, the more important step is the next step, a leap in thinking: do not indulge in the niche feelings of designers, use the power of the platform to scale up, not just serve a few people, but lower the operating threshold to help more users on a larger scale.

The above are some changes in thinking and consciousness before design. Next, combined with the solutions in the design process, I will share how to empower the business through pragmatic innovations in the project.

Professional innovation in the design process

Professional innovation includes: optimizing the existing product experience and exploring innovative possibilities in the experience chain. Next, we will discuss it from two aspects: design-driven products and data-driven design.

1. Design-driven products

This part includes three cases: testing, liking, and message interaction. The design is mainly based on the understanding of user demands and insights into user behavior.

Like

Liking is a well-known lightweight, low-cost interpersonal communication method. It originally came from social networks, from the recognition and attention of the publisher's views. It can please oneself and also motivate the publisher to express himself again.

In the live broadcasting scenes of pan-entertainment or e-commerce, the like function is conducive to creating the atmosphere of the live broadcast room. The audience interacts with the anchor lightly by likes to express their approval. The essence of e-commerce live broadcast is similar to TV shopping. Except for the shopping guide, it is very much like a show. When the audience watches the show, when they reach the exciting part, they will naturally convey their inner joy by clapping, and will not use the thumbs-up gesture to complete this action. So in the specific design, we replaced the static like ICON with a dynamic applause. The more likes and the more frequent they are, the faster the rhythm of the applause.

After clicking "Like" in the live broadcast room, bubbles will appear. The bubbles of C-type live broadcasts usually use some relaxed and cartoon elements, such as apples, hearts, diamonds, lollipops, etc.; the expectation of B-type users for business + live broadcasts is a focused and professional business scene, so the elements should be expressed closely following such scene impressions. For example, scenes such as source production, factory manufacturing, and business cooperation in the B-type concept can be expressed by extracting strong related elements such as raw material spindles, business cards, factories, and official letters.

The design idea of ​​this case is that the designer optimizes the experience by observing and thinking about the semantics of user behavior. No matter how small the design point is, it must be designed closely to the theme impression that the product wants to convey. Of course, in addition to good functional expression, the designer's task is also to make people smile knowingly. The warmer the applause, the more exciting the explanation.

Test

In order to ensure that the products put into production can meet the sales expectations after entering the market and avoid insufficient inventory or backlogs, suppliers will have the demand for sample testing in the early stage, which is commonly known as testing.

In the B scenario, suppliers are the main customers we serve. A major problem for suppliers is that they cannot find suitable testing tools. This is due to factors such as the long production transaction cycle, complex links, and high threshold for buyers to cooperate with testing, which makes it difficult to implement testing in existing scenarios. This is an obvious opportunity point that everyone can see, but it is also a pit that is difficult to fill.

The designer observed the live broadcast process and found an interesting phenomenon: the anchor (supplier) often guides buyers to call 1 for the products they like or want to order, so many buyers will reply to call 1 in the message interaction area. There are two key words here: like and want to order, which just correspond to the above-mentioned test demand. Combined with the scene characteristics of live broadcast Q&A, timely response, and clear buyer identity, it just makes up for the problem of not being able to get feedback in time and the vague scope of buyers in most Class B scenes.

Therefore, the live broadcast scene is a natural breeding ground for the testing function.

What did we do?

Translate the high-cost "call1" and "test" into a more straightforward expression - "like it", so that buyers can click to like the products they are interested in, and the background statistics are synchronized to the anchor, which is convenient for suppliers to make production predictions (stocking), marketing decisions (group batch discounts), etc. Buyers can also use the data to judge the popularity of the product in the downstream. And gradually establish the user's usage mentality, so that after the product is launched, there is no need for the anchor to repeatedly guide.

After the solution was output, we took the DEMO to conduct offline field interviews. Excitingly, the supplier’s feedback was very positive, and they proposed more scenarios where the testing function might be used, providing ideas and inspiration for our subsequent design.

The above case is a designer standing at the perspective of "customer first", observing the phenomenon, exerting subjective initiative to explore the essence and "propose needs for themselves". After the solution is verified offline, the product will work together to promote the launch of a function. The role change of the designer will help users solve pain points, and the designer will also gain greater satisfaction and sense of accomplishment.

Differences between anchors and viewers

When using the live broadcast room, the usage scenarios of the audience side and the anchor side are very different. Audience side: close-up and focused viewing, easy to listen, watch and interact. Anchor side: live broadcast while also needing to get close to the camera to see the audience's interaction, which is a big challenge for the anchor.

Therefore, we designed a focus screen for the anchor. In addition to the live broadcast itself, the buyer's message replies are displayed in full screen, and the font size and spacing will be enlarged. In addition, it provides a function for quickly locating unread messages. This function is mainly prepared for the anchor's assistant to facilitate viewing complete and clear buyer messages and replying to messages.

All of the above cases are centered around user demands and behaviors, and through designers’ insights and feasible innovations, they gradually realize design-driven product evolution.

2. Data-driven design

After the business design plan is output, the value needs to be verified through data. Let’s talk about data-based design through the live broadcast component upgrade case.

Component Upgrade

The old version of the component style has a simple overall content structure, the click-through conversion rate did not meet expectations, and the user bounce rate was high after entering the channel. The essence of watching e-commerce live broadcasts is to find products through live broadcasts, but the old version of the component has two problems:

• These live broadcasts have nothing to do with users’ purchasing preferences.
• Users see the cover of the live broadcast list, but have no idea what is being broadcast inside. It takes a long time for users to understand the content of a live broadcast (2 minutes on average).

To address the problem, we did two things to increase conversion rate and reduce churn:

• Personalized push notifications will be made based on the buyer’s identity. For example, users who follow the source factory will receive more factory live broadcast notifications.
• Improve the efficiency of component information transmission, and bring products, prices, explanation status, sales volume, and attributes to the foreground for intuitive display.

Ultimately, the efficiency of information acquisition for buyers and the transmission of key interest points to suppliers were both improved. After achieving accurate conversion, the click-through rate of core data increased by 31%, exceeding business expectations.

The above cases are not changes to the strategic framework or major functional points, but the designer’s drive and innovation are gradually expanded and influenced through these small points, ultimately maximizing the experience value.

Intelligent innovation in design development

When it comes to intelligence, the first impression people have is that it is high-end, but what we need to do is to leverage new technologies to provide users with practical and down-to-earth innovations.

1. Voice is easily available

Live streaming is an online reflection of offline merchants’ sales scenarios. Listing products is an important part of online business, and the same is true for live streaming. Merchants hope to quickly list products during live streaming, avoiding the cumbersome listing process in the past, so that what the audience sees is what they get, and achieving the goal of fast broadcast and fast sales in the live streaming room.

Currently, the live broadcast room uses a floating page to carry the listing function, which has the following problems:

• Independent operation barriers. The anchor cannot put the products on the shelves alone, and needs the cooperation of the anchor and the assistant.
• The operation time is long. It takes about 2-3 minutes to put a product on the shelf, which will interrupt the continuity of the live broadcast.

Our product needs to operate smoothly without interrupting the live broadcast, and the products should be put on the shelves quickly and lightly during the live broadcast. Therefore, the design adopts a multi-round guided voice dialogue method to meet the anchor's demand for putting products on the shelves during the live broadcast. As shown in the figure, the anchor only needs to follow the guidance and voice input the corresponding product content to complete the product listing. This shortens the operation time of listing and solves the problem of long-distance interaction, allowing the anchor to list products lightly and independently.

2. Smart short videos

Currently, most short videos are produced in a refined manner, which can only be done by a few capable businesses. It takes a lot of time and cost, and is not easy to scale up. However, Shang+Live has a large amount of video content. It can automatically generate short videos from live broadcasts at low cost and scale through certain rules, and distribute them to businesses through multiple channels, such as Douyin, Meipai and other platforms.

For short videos:

• Live streaming is a natural production base for video source materials, and live streaming is the source of content.
• The live broadcast content also provides professional explanations of each product, and the products are professional content.
• Lightweight and intelligent capture of every video clip in the live broadcast, intelligent slicing means short video.

In the off-site part, the same video is intelligently edited into different length versions for distribution on different platforms, such as a 10-second version for Moments and a 15-second version for Douyin. The video content takes into account the time limit and distribution efficiency, and mainly presents multiple product collections to attract viewers. In terms of the sophistication of video presentation, through the optimization and design of templates, the final presentation quality can reach the mid-range level (500 yuan/video) that merchants find agencies to shoot.

Summarize

As a designer, on the one hand, we need to pay attention to different industries and integrate a variety of new information. On the other hand, in the future, designers will not only be assessed on their visual expression, but on development in more dimensions. In the face of these design challenges, we must also develop and transform: through the commercialization of design innovation, let the design results form a scale for more users to use; combine new technologies to expand the boundaries of design capabilities and make more valuable innovations. Therefore, our innovative design is still on the way.