Walmart Flip Messaging Platform

Revamped the entire platform to drive higher adoption and lower communication cost

I joined the team at the end of Q2, to help improve the cross-platform experience and push the product into the next level.

Dates

April 2019 - May 2020

Role

Lead Product Designer

User Research

Product Strategy

Team

Kelly, Product

Anthony, Engineer

Aaron, Design

Ross, Engineer Lead

Minjie, Engineer

Alaina, Engineer

A Collaborative Process

I worked within a cross-functional team of 7. As the only designer on the team, I designed experience from end to end, also helped the team with metric analytics, business values evaluation, and idea validation

Our goal was to save cost for global sourcing operations

Challenges

CHALLENGE #1

Low Feature Adoption

80% of feature clicks were coming from only 15% of features.

CHALLENGE #2

Low user satisfaction rate

The product had been received 0 NPS and a fair amount of complaints.

CHALLENGE #3

Limited engineering resources

Due to limited engineering resources, our team had to spend more time maintaining current system than improving existing user experience.

APPROACH

Find the cause of low feature adoption through evaluation on UX

To better understand the existing design, I started to do an evaluation to map out the structure of product. The misuse of bottom navigation bar left no space for other features, the consequence was that users had to go to hamburger menu to find them.

APPROACH

Improved conversation creation process

20%

Decrease in time spent on the entire process

0

Number of complaints

APPROACH

Validate ideas and iterate early, often and fast with limited engineering resource

The entire process was lean and fast. We went to users' site to watch how they were doing their tasks, which provided a great opportunity for us to quickly validate ideas, learn feedback, and pivot.

REIMAGINE FLIP

Design a product specialized for global sourcing

The purpose of the new design was to ensure that users know about the major capabilities, as well as to fix some of the issues identified early on based on the UX evaluation. one of the other goals was to align design with the design system, minimize design debt and deliver a coherent Walmart experience to associates.

Multiple Quotes, One Conversation

With the threading feature, users don't have to create separate conversations with the same supplier on different quotes.

CORE FEATURE

Task Management

This feature enables users to be able to create one or more tasks for a supplier, which brings more efficiency in communication while users are needing multiple changes to multiple quotes. This will also allow for tracking of completeness of tasks and product stages faster than the current manual process today.

Beyond a chat App

Our vision was to transform Flip from a tool to a platform, making it the hub of all sourcing applications in the future.

FLIP WEB

Create a consistent experience across platforms

Flip embedded in other products

With Flip embedded, we can leverage the advantages of Flip to facilitate more efficient communication while users are in other products.

Results

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Experimenting at low cost with speed - so we can fail fast and iterate

Being creative and coming up with ideas is important, but one thing we need to admit is that half of our ideas will likely not work. That needs us to have convincing evidence before building prototypes, which also requires us to:

Spend the time making assumption validations.
Constantly getting feedback from users to validate the desirability of ideas.
Not just talk, build relationship with your users so they are willing to give you honest feedback.