HandsUP Live is a B2B2C live e-commerce service under 17LIVE. Customers are currently expanding to the world with Japanese business as the center. With the live distribution know-how cultivated through Japan's No. 1 live distribution application "17LIVE (Ichinana)" and numerous live commerce cases, it supports a companion type even before the introduction. In addition, customers can use it with confidence because HandsUP supply a highly stable server. Advocating one-stop from EC shop construction to live distribution. Merchants can sell products in real-time and purchase them while watching live. Since the sales promotion functions required to increase sales are also substantial, the growth potential is endless with customized extension functions according to the growth speed of the business.
HandsUP is mainly to provide ToB services for large enterprises and small customers to provide live sales. However, many small customers abandon the use of HandsUP soon after using it, resulting in a customer churn rate. After our sales ask with customers, it was found that most small and medium-sized companies cannot build a live and sales page like Uniqlo or GU such a large enterprise, and they gave up using this service because of the high threshold. After discussion with PM, we decided to establish a hypothesis. To solve this pain point for users, and greatly reduce the difficulty for all customers to use live sales. So we decided to establish a way for small and medium-sized enterprises to quickly establish a sales page in a short time and start live-streaming sales of goods at any time.
We unanimously believe that improving the convenience of merchants to start broadcasting can bring about the growth of both the merchant and the company's GMV.
"Create a Live Selling Page easy to use for the merchants before starting a Live Stream"
Since there are currently no customized live broadcast products in the Japanese domestic market, HandsUP is the first precedent, so in the analysis of competing products, I chose directly related competing products and indirect related competing products. Directly related competing products are related to the E-Commerce sales website, indirectly related to all products related to customized CMS Platform, through cross-analysis to list their advantages and disadvantages to analyze related functions and general user needs in the current market.
On the other hand, I invited members of the internal team members to conduct a quick Design Sprint with me internally. Because it was during the epidemic COVID-19, we all work from home so I chose Miro, a remote collaboration software, for this online workshop for the first time. The double diamond theory was used to stimulate the members to brainstorm against the two topics. The dual perspectives of "being a consumer" and "being a merchant" to increase the empathy to our users and collection of ideas in the design, and then converge. Finally, prioritize and discuss the ideas after convergence, so that I can discuss and arrange the development phase with product manager in the later steps.
In the end, after analyzing competitive products and the design thinking workshop within the team, I summarized the results of brainstorming with the team, and discussed with our product manager the scope of our Phase 1 priority development, so that the team can turn back and focus on our goals at any time.
After determining the direction of the first phase of the product, it is necessary to clarify the pain points and help our users to solve the problems they encounter and to confirm the use process, so the Storyboard is very suitable for presenting an intuitive and easy-to-understand User Journey Map, which not only allows the team to better focus on the context of users using our CMS system, it is also convenient for our Japanese sales present to our clients understand the value that CMS can bring to them from time to time. UI Flow is a process that needs to define functions at the beginning, it is necessary to make me convenient to communicate with the development at any time during the design process and reach a logical consensus with our developers.
Because it is a new function from zero to one, the first version uses black and white Wireframe to communicate with the team and Stakeholders, and uses the Figma rapid prototype to quickly let the inside and outsiders understand the structure of the whole product and the actual user experience, and use this version iteratively adjusted the details of several versions before finalizing the final backbone of the product.
Wireframe decided to reach a consensus before entering the design of UI details. This stage focuses on the consistency of design components. Another challenge is that HandsUP is an existing service, so it has its unique style and design specifications, so the new designs must be added in accordance with the current design style on the site, and the component design must also conform to the Japanese style.
Mark the UI Spec on mockup before development, to discuss with the front-end and understand the principle of plate cutting, and to ensure the smooth launch of the product on time.
After releasing the first version a few weeks later, I collaborate with PM research via product analysis tool Hotjar to observe the metrics we define, and we found that the usage rate up to 25% than before, and truly solve the main merchant's pain point and get more long-term contracts from new clients!
Competitor analysis and brainstorming help us to narrow down and define the real problem.
The requirement in B2B from the client sometimes needs to be solved fast or may lost opportunities, so defining different phases is important in the experience, it might not be the perfect solution in the beginning but we can meet to user's needs and keep iterating the product in the next phase.
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