Beyond Shopping
Buy together
Period: Dec 2022 - Apr 2023
Role: Shopping UX Lead
I collaborated with my team members and global designers to drive brainstorming and ideation sessions, creating a new design plan for the next phase of the shopping product. Focused on uncovering opportunities for growth, I guided the design process to enhance user experience and support the platform's evolution, ensuring impactful results for the global e-commerce service.Challenge: Shopping’s new opportunity exploration over social journey
Solution: We reimagined the shopping experience by analyzing the current user journey and benchmarking competitors’ UI and UX to identify opportunities for a social commerce platform. By understanding user mindsets and behaviors, we explored solutions that balance individual and community-driven experiences. Our design ideations, supported by brief mockups, focused on key social triggers to create engaging, collaborative shopping experiences. This approach blends e-commerce with social interaction, unlocking new growth opportunities.
Background
LINE Shopping serves approximately 7.5 million users, each visiting the platform with specific goals. While redesigning the TW Shopping service presents an opportunity to attract new user segments, it also carries the risk of losing existing users. Leveraging LINE's extensive 21 million user base, the LINE family of services is well-positioned to drive growth across e-commerce channels by connecting end consumers with small and medium suppliers more effectively. Initiatives like Group Deal and Live Commerce strengthen this connection while maintaining core product attributes such as competitive pricing, high product quality, fast delivery, and the trust our users have come to expect.
LINE’s Social Power & issues
In Taiwan, LINE is primarily used as a messaging app rather than a typical social media platform. However, commerce services like LINE Shopping and Giftshop are gaining traction among users. For instance, users visit LINE Shopping to earn LINE Points and switch to Giftshop to purchase gifts, such as coffee or birthday cakes for friends.
To further unlock the potential of social commerce, we aim to expand into Group Deal and create synergy across LINE’s family services. However, several critical questions arise as we explore this opportunity:
Should we target existing LINE Shopping users with a new experience integrating additional services?
Is there another e-commerce service within LINE better suited to lead social commerce efforts?
What product strategy should we pursue — vertical, horizontal, or a combination of both?
These questions are pivotal in defining LINE Shopping's role and model in the ecosystem, guiding the direction for future product development and user experience strategy.
Other non-E-commerce services can provide valuable insights into social dynamics, where user behaviors and mindsets play a critical role in informing our design and research decisions. To better understand these dynamics, our first step is to map and clarify the user journey, focusing on how users act and what influences their decision-making.
User journey & CHALLENGE
Understanding the context in which users interact with a product is key to uncovering their behaviors, needs, and challenges. Mapping the user journey allows us to identify pain points, understand how users seek assistance when facing barriers, and pinpoint moments that may contribute to churn.
At this stage of the product concept, Giftshop has been separated into an independent application, serving as an entry point insdie of Shopping platform based on product strategy and cost center considerations. As a result, LINE Shopping takes on a key role in driving social dynamics, integrating features such as Group Deal and Live Commerce.
However, our research highlights distinct differences between these shopping experiences. LINE Shopping users typically know what products they want to purchase and visit the platform to earn LINE Points, with transactions redirected to partner sites. In contrast, Group Deal and Live Commerce cater to shoppers who often browse without a specific target, engaging through exploration and in-app transactions without redirections.
These unique shopping journeys introduce a critical design challenge: product navigation. To address this, we analyzed how competitors structure and optimize their UI design to support similar experiences.
The LINE App has evolved into a comprehensive platform housing numerous family services. To ensure an unified and consistent branding experience, we focus on maintaining clear visual language and intuitive navigation, enabling users to easily understand where they are and how to complete their tasks seamlessly. With this goal in mind, we propose a more accessible service navigation and a consistent look and feel across landing pages to enhance clarity and usability.
In our new E-commerce design proposal, we integrate the strengths of both patterns, effectively showcasing key design principles such as clear navigation, information architecture, visual hierarchy, and brand integration. Our approach strikes a balance between maintaining the product’s unique identity and delivering a cohesive, unified E-commerce branding experience.
To scale the synergy across LINE’s e-commerce services, we focused on resolving in-link and out-link navigation challenges to ensure users enjoy seamless and delightful experiences without feeling lost. With a clear navigation strategy in place for the E-commerce family pages, we now turn our attention to the next core design concept: Social Commerce. This exploration will dive into opportunities from both individual and community perspectives to create a richer, more engaging shopping experience.
OPPORTUNITIES & TRIGGERING POINTS
While online shopping is traditionally an individual activity, introducing social elements — a direction LINE has been striving to embrace and transforms the experience into a more interactive and engaging journey. By integrating these elements, shopping evolves into a dynamic, socially-driven activity that redefines user interaction and participation. The ideations that we come up with are outlined below in a tree structure, where each main frame starts with a story of me and my friends could do to each other.
From a user-centric perspective, we brainstormed ideas inspired by successful features in other products. These concepts aim to strengthen connections between users and their friends, fostering social engagement while simultaneously driving sales growth.
INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVE:
Me PERSPECTIVE
Three proposed concepts of social E-commerce under Me perspective under individual point of view: Wishlist, My selection, and Share good deal
The Wishlist is a widely recognized feature across online shopping platforms, and in our design, we expand its scope to include a variety of content beyond products. Users can save items such as coupons, event tickets, vouchers, and even favorite content like movies, concert tickets, and marketing campaigns. This feature seamlessly integrates across the LINE family services ecosystem, encompassing offerings from TV, Music, Taxi, and Spot, enabling users to conveniently organize and revisit their interests on a daily basis.
The Wishlist can be extended to support interactive features, such as posting questions, requests, or help inquiries. For example, users could post, “#Exchange: Can anyone swap tickets with me for the One Republic Saturday concert?” or list second-hand goods for sale. Friends can like, comment, share, or respond to these posts, with the option to interact anonymously, fostering a collaborative and engaging social shopping experience.
In My Selection, users can curate products as their personalized picks. The more items users select, the higher their score or credit grows. If others purchase products from a user’s curated selection, they can earn additional benefits, credits, or even profit-sharing rewards, creating an engaging and incentivized shopping experience.
The Share Good Deal feature enables users to post and share discounts or coupons, such as those received from LINE Official Accounts. Users can resell these deals or allow others to purchase them at a lower price, fostering a collaborative and cost-saving shopping experience.
INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVE:
FRIEND PERSPECTIVE
One big proposed concept of social E-commerce under Friend perspective under individual point of view: Shopping master
The Shopping Master feature awards users badges based on their individual shopping experiences and purchase records. These badges not only showcase expertise but also allow friends to consult trusted users when considering specific products. Achieving higher badge levels unlocks rewards or special privileges, creating a sense of achievement and fostering social interaction within the shopping experience.
COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVE
Our current shopping-related content — including articles, videos, and sponsored ads — remains scattered across the platform. To enhance user engagement, this content should be well-curated with a focus on social interaction, drawing inspiration from platforms like Openchat, unboxing videos, and Live Commerce. Additionally, Coupong offers a dedicated entry point for overseas commodities, positioning LINE to play a pivotal role in connecting suppliers and customers effectively. Finally, by enabling users to post questions or inquiries and receive help from others within the network, we can further strengthen user connections and foster a collaborative community.
BUnDLE Social commerce with line points
One of the main entry points for LINE Shopping resides under the Wallet tab, alongside numerous family services, all competing for user attention. Many of these services are tightly integrated with the LINE Points ecosystem, a key motivator driving user engagement. Our core strategy focuses on leveraging social power to enhance e-commerce and other services, enabling users to earn more LINE Points while fostering deeper engagement. By layering services like Finance, Shopping, and other e-commerce offerings, users are encouraged to explore more deeply within the LINE ecosystem, unlocking greater value and interaction.
As of Q1 2023, LINE is undergoing a redesign of the Wallet tab, where services such as Shopping, LINE Pay, LINE Bank, and Life information will be more prominently showcased to capture user attention. This redesign aims to leverage high-traffic services as entry points to guide and redirect traffic to other service channels, fostering cross-service engagement.
The E-commerce navigation challenge highlights the importance of establishing a clear service hierarchy, ensuring an intuitive layer structure and seamless traffic flow. Our design approach addresses the needs of both light users — offering simplicity and ease of access — and heavy users, enabling them to quickly find value and the services they seek.
TAOBAO’S SHOPPING TOGETHER
Taobao’s social commerce features provide a real-life shopping experience by enabling users to invite friends while browsing products and even engage in live calls, replicating the enjoyment of shopping together. A thoughtful touch follows the call — a pop-up message summarizing the time spent with friends during the shopping journey.
Another innovative feature allows users to add an extra product for a friend at the final checkout stage, fostering shared experiences and gifting.
Social commerce operates across multiple experience layers — emotional, transactional, and interactive — each fulfilling specific user needs. Whether through video or photo sharing, these social behaviors seamlessly transition from offline to online, reinforcing the innate desire for connection and collaboration in shopping.
SOCIAL REVOLUTION
In the article "Social Strikes Back," a16z discusses the emergence of innovative social networks like Clubhouse and the integration of social components across various consumer products, including education, shopping, fitness, and entertainment. This resurgence highlights the growing importance of social features in enhancing user engagement and retention across diverse sectors.
a16z's exploration of "Social+ and Social Tech" delves into how emerging social technologies are influencing e-commerce and other consumer products. By incorporating social components, companies can enhance growth, retention, and engagement, creating more compelling and interactive user experiences.
In summary, a16z's insights reveal a dynamic evolution in social platforms, driven by innovative technologies and changing user behaviors. The integration of social features across diverse products, the rise of audio-based interactions, and the influence of generative AI are collectively shaping the future of social engagement.
Source: a16z
Reflection on Social Commerce Strategy
Our team developed numerous innovative ideas aligned with LINE's core value to users. However, after extensive discussions with stakeholders and consultants, the team decided not to pursue the social commerce strategy at this stage. The decision was driven by a combination of complex factors, including business profitability, technical feasibility, and growth sustainability, as well as concerns about whether users visiting our shopping platform prioritize quick transactions over social interactions.
That said, I personally believe that social DNA is deeply embedded in society. If harnessed effectively, it holds untapped potential that could unlock significant opportunities and enable us to scale swiftly across markets.