Shopee Product Design Challenge 2021 Reflections

During December, I partnered up with Cassie, another aspiring UX designer, in the Shopee Product and Design Challenge. We entered the challenge not because we wanted to win, but simply to exercise and apply the skills and methodologies we have learnt in the past semester from a module we took together : 'Intro to Interaction Design'. This blog post serves as a space for more personal reflection of the event rather than a case-study presentation.

There are 2 reasons to why I did not want to create a full blown case study post for this challenge.

1. I felt like this was not a very well done project as the short timeline combined with having a small group of 2 made it difficult to produce outstanding work

2. One of the deliverables for the challenge was a 15-page write up and hence it did not make sense to me to create one whole new page just to copy and paste the write up.

Reflection

Personally, the challenge gave me newfound respect to UX designers (especially those in start-ups or less-than-equipped companies) as I believe they experience these levels of anxiety and uncertainty whenever they approach vague problems and are given short timelines to do so.

Throughout the challenge I also managed to speak to a few people and discussed with them about how Shopee's design decisions in their application and gained a fresh new perspective.

To the average Singaporean user, the common consensus about the Shopee app is how its entire interface looks like (and personally I still feel is) a big cluster**** and often wonder why Shopee does not change it. There is even a video parody on this, which I feel is hilarious

To me, it seems obvious that the Shopee designers know this, but do not change it due to some secret reasoning behind it.

I have two theories behind this :

First, Shopee just copies from larger ecommerce apps like Taobao, with a cluttered home page with all the bells and whistles with the mindset that 'if it works for them, it should work for us!' and I don't fault them for that. Copying brings about a sense of familiarity for the user who probably uses more than one ecommerce application (and also, it is probably difficult to reinvent the wheel on how the ecommerce landing page should look like).

The second, (and probably more likely) theory would be that the design is to suit their largest customer base, Indonesia. As Singaporeans, getting the products we want is as easy as ABC. 70-80% of consumer goods are probably readily available to the average Singaporean just by taking a few bus-stops or train stations to the nearest heartland mall. On the other hand, the average person in Indonesia does not have such a luxury afforded to them. Hence, the seemingly crowded / claustrophobic landing page in the Shopee app is a welcome one for them as they truly experience the convenience of buying everything and anything from the app. Having such a layout gives the impression of having a megamall right at their fingertips, where scrolling the millions of product pages is akin to window shopping. The layout gives their Indonesian users value and enhances their user experience (while in contrast, diminishes the experience for us Singaporean Users).

All in all, I learnt a ton through the Shopee Product and Design Challenge, and even though we did not even make it to the semi-finals, I feel the takeaways of experience and new insight was worth the effort.