Mercadolibre.com

Re-thinking the online shopping experience

The challenge

To help the organisation to rethink their mobile experience. The overall experience at the time of this project was perceived as purely functional and outdated, we aimed to explore together how to improve both the product experience and the methods through which the teams approached creating them

My role

I was responsible for creating and executing a human centred design program to rethinking mercadolibre’s mobile application experience. During this project I created multidisciplinary teams involving design, development and product members of the company (At that time working in craft base teams) and guided them in exploring their current product scenario and analogous industries, define a narrative of what potential futures might look like, prototype and test potential experiences and ultimately document both the outcome of a new design language a some potential key features such as new navigation paradigms.

Approach

Context mapping:

Create a baseline understanding across teams and disciplines summarising what we know around where we are and where we want to be. In the first sessions we studied the brand and product perception of each of the key stakeholders of the project. We talked about the brand attributes, personality and purpose. As a result we jointly defined a strategy on how we wanted to impact our users and enhance the app experience

Analogous inspiration:

After defining objectives and studying the actual state of the mercadolibre’s mobile experience, we look for parallels in other contexts that help us to understand how people face situations of purchase in places with multiple sellers and high complexity in offerings/pricing structures. For this went with the team to do some shopping in the China Town area of Buenos Aires.

We started to design based on the different situations that we faced in the previous experiences. For example, how we compare one product from another? In the stores we simply took them off the shelf and read their packaging, we touched them, smell them.

Design explorations

After creating our north map and conceptual hero flows of where we wanted to be we designed multiple iterations of how mercadolibre’s app could potentially look, feel and work. During this process we explored multiple features based on different customer intents, we explored ways to inspire, guide and inform customers, helping redefine the way people navigate, browse and filter through mercadolibre’s application.

We also started to incorporate the brand personality into the process, replacing the generic look & feel of the app—at that time—and positioning it as an important part of the experience between buyers and sellers.

Documentation and guidelines

As a result of the project we developed a new UX and UI guide that provides a more comprehensive experience for users and explores new possibilities for discovery and interaction within the Mercadolibre environment. This guide keeps growing as its implemented in many of the Mercadolibre’s products such as website and mobile applications.

Designing the multi-seller shopping cart experience for Latam’s complexity

The challenge

To design a shopping cart experience that allows customers to add items from multiple sellers, different payment and shipping conditions while ensuring a consistent and expectable experience for both buyers and sellers.

My role

To lead a team of designers, developers and researchers in developing this experience including problem understanding, prototypes validation and design specifications delivery.

Approach

1. Experiencing a similar problem: It all started with a trip with the team to a local super market to go over the experience of buying multiple items paying with different methods and generating situations that forced conflicts of conditions (this where pre designed for the teams to have to go through them)
2. Understanding the problem space: We created an aggregated view of market and customer insights available, performed competitive analysis and mapped out key customer pain points in the current flow. As an outcome of this phase we had key user personas and customer scenarios we needed to support in our explorations.
3. Designing user flows: Using the insights uncovered we embarked in mapping hero journeys for the key customer scenarios, identify mainstream and extreme cases and map out the key requirements for the shopping cart feature.
4. Prototyping and iterating: We prototyped series of solutions, user tested them and iterated on the designs that would become the barebones of the shopping cart feature released in mercadolibre’s app.