Problem Statement

Whilst having separate platforms has its benefits, B2B lagged behind its B2C platform counterpart in terms of feature evolution and shopping experiences - while incurring extra costs for the business.

How can we bring the best of both platforms to our customers?

Breakdown of Problem

Business users could not enjoy powerful features found on B2C

Personalization, powerful search, marketplace promotions are just some of the B2C features not available for business users.

Slow turnaround on bug fixes and feature evolution

As it serves a significantly smaller customer base as compared to FPon, less resources is dedicated to the build and support - hence resulting in less feature and longer turnaround times.

Increased costs and duplicated efforts for the organisation

Developing and maintaining FairPrice for Buiness and FPon means overlaps in resources that could have been saved.

Hypothesis

An integrated grocery platform for B2C and B2B consumers will allow users to benefit from a wider range of valuable features, while helping the business save costs and efforts.

Project Goals

1. Design and build all critical business features on FPon

2. Smoothly migrate existing business users to FPon

3. Enable new business users to sign up from FPon

Challenges

No tolerance for delays or incompleteness

All critical B2B and migration features had to be migrated over successfully to enable the business shopping experience - and before the license for the old B2B platform expired.

B2C customers’ shopping experience cannot be disrupted

Rolling out the changes should not disrupt the regular B2C customers’ experience, who make up a large proportion of the customer base.

How do we handle duplicate logins used for both B2B and B2C?

A small % of users used the same email address for both platforms. This poses a problem for both user experience and data migration on the backend.

Research

Understanding the requirements to recreate a seamless end-to-end business shopping experience on the new integrated platform.

Research methodologies used included:

1. Design Review

A thorough design review of the website, and an internal usability test with some design teammates (*validated and iterated with customer interviews later in usability testing).

2. Stakeholder Interviews

Interviews with the business and operations teams to understand the behind-the-scenes workflow, and dig into their objectives and needs for the migration.

3. Competitive Analysis

For both online grocery shopping (e.g. Shopee, Redmart, Amazon Fresh) and platforms that cater to business users (e.g. Lyreco, Apple, Lazada, telco providers).

Brainstorm & Design

I set out to translate the existing customer journey map into FPon, from the point where the user enters the old business site, to the point when they place their order and receive their delivery. Here are some of the preliminary sketches and design concepts:

Usability Testing

I planned and executed a user study with business users to:
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• Understand their motivations and intentions for shopping with FairPrice for Business
• Evaluate the ease of migration/switching over to the new platform
• Test individual features ported over to the new platform
• Identify any other missing critical features not planned for migration

Partnering up with a senior designer on the team, we interviewed 6 B2B users. Unfortunately, we did not manage to recruit any users that shopped on both FairPrice for Business (for B2B) and FPon (for B2C).

Here are the key findings:

Users have mixed opinions on having a unified login to shop for both business and personal needs

Overall split votes on whether dual-purpose accounts should be allowed, but the general compromise was that as long as it was conveyed clearly and consistently, it should be fine.

Consistent feedback and clear instructions are key for successful migration

Some of the copy was not intuitive enough for users to understand. 2 users did not understand why they had to reset their password during the migration, and another mentioned they did it "because it asked me to".

A personalised homepage targetted at pantry and event needs is extremely valuable

4/6 of users said that they browsed the homepage when they shop, to view promotional items/good deals, and browse new and interesting products that they could add to cart or keep in mind for future purchases.

Design Iterations

All in all, we conducted 3 rounds of usability testing across 3 weeks to finish testing all features to be migrated, get more user insights on whether to allow unified logins, and ensuring that the overall flow is smooth and easy for our users to understand — each time iterating the flow, design and copy.

Final Design — Highlights

An easy, intuitive and clear transition for business users

We tested/iterated the flow and copy multiple times, to ensure that is clear and precise for all business users. In our final usability test, all users clearly understood the migration and were confident of their actions as they performed the task.

With 10+ essential business features migrated over

From password reset, editing business details in account, managing differences in shopping logic between personal and business, setting up three additional payment methods during checkout, creating an invoice, and more - to ensure that business users could shop as usual on the new platform.

Users have the flexibility of having the same login to shop for both personal and business needs

Our final decision was to allow dual-purpose accounts - users can switch between personal and business shopping with the same account.

We made sure that the distinction between both interfaces were obvious throughout their shopping experience, and that they could switch between both easily.

The customers who only shopped for either personal and business were not affected - the toggling function was hidden.

Key Learnings

Users, users, users! They are your most valuable asset.

As a junior designer in my first month in the company, I was drilled with questions from my mentor: How did you come to this decision? Why did you choose that? Did you test it with users? It was tough, but it really did get ingrained within me to always practice a users-first mentality, and to always let users guide design decisions.

Planning and executing user studies

I had the opportunity to watch and learn from senior researchers on the design team, and subsequently plan and execute full user studies by myself.

Writing simple and effective copywriting

Copy was exceptionally important in this project. It’s eye-opening to see what a big difference it makes in shaping user experiences - and I picked up some tips from the copywriter I was working with along the way!

FairPrice —

Migrating FairPrice for Business