'To cross the line'. It's an idiomatic phrase that means to go beyond a certain limit or threshold. It's often used to describe someone who does something that's beyond acceptable behavior, but it's also often used in a good way - to exceed limits.
The theme of ‘2023 Coupang Design CONNECT’ was also pointedly ‘design that crosses the line’. 2023 Coupang Design CONNECT, held for the second year in a row, is a networking event of knowledge sharing with UX designers.
Throughout this event, examples of designs that cross and blur the lines of ‘limits’, ‘screen’, and ‘border’ were revealed. From the insights gained while entering the Taiwan market to how the growth of WoW membership, Coupang's product design cases revealed at this event were divided into two parts.
"We started this event with the idea of sharing with designers in the tech industry the experiences we've been learning. We hope that today's event will help you build great products." - Tessa Kim, Head of UX at Coupang, welcome speech at 2023 Coupang Design CONNECT
The venue of 2023 Coupang Design CONNECT
1. Crossing the border: Taiwanese apps designed in Korea
Lee Hae-yeon(Kate), Product Designer, Global Expansion UX Team
In 2021, Coupang entered Taiwan as a dark store, and Coupang Taiwan also launched Rocket Jikgu and Rocket Delivery. How does the user experience differ between Korea and Taiwan?
Coupang Taiwan app design was initially launched benchmarking Coupang app running in South Korea because it was the fastest way to go, but also because from an engineering perspective, it was the most efficient in the long run.
This approach brought four unexpected challenges. They were language differences, cultural differences, familiarity differences, and legal and institutional differences.
When the Coupang designers was preparing to enter Taiwan, they spent some time looking at offline stores and local e-commerce services in Taiwan. They noticed something interesting about discount markups.
If you sell a product that costs 1,000 won for 700 won, you would say "30% off" in Korea.
In Taiwan, however, it's common to write the amount the customer would have to pay, i.e. 70%, or in the local language, 7折(7NT). But if it's 25% off, it's not 7.5NT, it's 75NT.
So, for now, Coupang Taiwan adapts the discount information to the Greater China discount notation.
Korea and Taiwan have different shipping cultures. This was an important factor in bringing Rocket Delivery to Taiwan.
In South Korea, deliveries to the door are the norm. Even if there is a communal front door, it is mostly digital and opened by pressing a number key. The payment method is also prepaid, which means you pay for the order before receiving the goods.
Entrance to an apartment building in Taiwan
However, many apartment buildings in Taiwan are completely off-limits to outsiders, and often require a key to open the communal front door.
It's also common in Taiwan to pick up packages at businesses like convenience stores and post offices, where you can check out the product and return it on the spot if you don't like it.
They also prefer to pay later(cash), so they often complete the payment after receiving the goods.
So Coupang Taiwan changed its service to allow shoppers to set their address to a convenience store, and also offered a deferred payment option. This helped to reduce the number of failed deliveries and increase the payment conversion rate.
The challenges of rapidly launching a service like this have served as a foundation for growing Coupang Taiwan.
One of Coupang's leadership principles is ‘Learn Voraciously’. This culture means that we don't rationalize our mistakes and we look everywhere for the best ideas. As a result, we're not afraid to try to solve problems, which you can see in the process of launching Coupang Taiwan.
Park Ji-hong(Hong), a product designer on the WOW & Fresh UX team.
As of Q1 2023, there are about 19 million active customers on Coupang, of which about 11 million are WOW members. How to retain these 11 million WOW members and attract more people to WOW was revealed at the Design CONNECT. This is a case of solving a problem through systematic, incremental improvements.
Hidden WOW membership signup buttons throughout the purchase journey
To increase WOW Membership sign-ups, the WOW & Fresh UX team first took a look at the status quo. They broke down the customer's path to purchase and identified the most active steps in the process.
"Home - Product listings - Product details - View product information - Cart - Checkout". There are a total of six steps a customer goes through when purchasing a product from a search, and it was the 'checkout' screen that was converting the most customers into WOW members.
Before & after comparison of the product information screen
As of September last year, the "Checkout" page highlighted faster shipping times as one of the benefits of WOW membership. You could choose a guaranteed arrival date between today and tomorrow, but now the comparison is based on price. It shows the benefits of being a WOW member by comparing the 'Coupang sale price' and 'WOW coupon discount'.
It's a small change at first glance, but the conversion rate for WOW members is much higher when price is compared.
To achieve this result, the WOW & Fresh UX team ran more than 5 tests, considering all 30+ case scenarios, including customer type, shipping, and the presence of WOW-only discounts. The team also tried changing the type of offer, adding more details, and changing the button wording.
At Coupang, people run thousands big change, our design team tries to minimize the number of variables by making many small changes. This is because if you make a lot of changes at once, it's hard to know which ones are really responsible for the improvement.
It's also a reflection of Coupang's leadership principle that when we see a problem, we dig deeper every step of the way until we fully understand the issue.
The design team looks for real problems in a wide range of areas and makes systematic, step-by-step improvements to solve them.
Park Ji-hong, a product designer from the WOW & Fresh UX team, said, " Coupang's design is wide, deep, and incremental." Breaking the conflicting values of wide and deep is what makes this story so compelling, and breaking tradeoffs is one of the things we strive for at Coupang.
Coupang's designers presenting at Design CONNECT.
From left, Kim Hyunsoo, Park Ji-hong, Ok Yeonjeong, Yoo Gahee, Lee Hae-yeon, and Yoo Ramsun.
In addition to these two examples, the 2023 Coupang Design CONNECT was filled with many other design examples from Coupang. Attendees were eager to learn more about Coupang's design practices that they hadn't seen elsewhere.
"After listening to the presentation, I think I got a lot of good insights that made me want to join Coupang."
"This is the first time I've heard about Coupang's design system, so that was the most interesting part."
"It was good to see Coupang designers all over the space, and I think you prepared each program so that we could network naturally, so I enjoyed it well."
If you're curious to see more design cases revealed at the event and find career opportunities, visit Coupang.jobs.
This article is from the Coupang Newsroom and to read more please visit here.
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