Alimarket
Marketplace for small bussiness
Company
Alicorp
Year
2020
Alicorp is a Peruvian company with an international presence that is dedicated to producing, marketing and distributing a wide variety of products, from food to industrial items. Founded in 1956, Alicorp has grown and is now present in several Latin American countries, bringing its quality to more people. In 2019, the company began its journey towards digital transformation, which led to major changes within its organisation.
In 2020, the pandemic spread around the world which had a significant economic impact on everyone.
This generated a great uncertainty in all companies around the world, we at Alicorp were no strangers to this situation, we began to report lack of stocks in our distribution centers because our salesmen could not move around the country due to the strict quarantine imposed by the President of Peru.
This caused delays in orders and deliveries, since, in order for the owner of a minimarket to obtain our products, he had to wait up to seven working days for one of our salesmen to come to his business and offer him our products, then two to three days had to pass before finally receiving the products and being able to offer them to his customers. This was impossible to achieve with the pandemic.
By context and company need, this project had a chance to be Alicorp's first digital product and also the one that would bring relief to all the problems that existed at the time. Our users, according to previous research, were between 50 and 60 years old, were warehouse owners and had economic responsibility within their household. With this context in mind, we realised that our users were not digital at all, so if we planned to give them a digital product, it had to be simple and short steps. A great opportunity to design a product for older people.
The main objective of this project was to end the supply problems without breaking the rules established by the Peruvian government through a digital product. On the other hand, I think that a secondary objective could be the difficulty we had to design in digital for an audience that does not consume anything digital, it was quite an odyssey.
My design process is usually divided into three stages, in the first stage, Discovery, we focus on understanding the business and user needs, in the second stage we tangibilise this and turn it into design, in the third stage we prepare everything so that the development team can implement it.
In our Discovery stage, as we mentioned earlier, we focused on understanding the context, the pains of our users and the pains of the business as well. Thus, we had several ideation sessions and then we asked ourselves the following question
Who are we designing for?
We wanted to know our users, who they are, how they live, what they do, how they run their business. We then conducted interviews to gather their discomfort, to find out how the pandemic was affecting them in their business. After all the interviews we identified four types of users based on their behaviour patterns.
After our interviews, based on the responses of our users, we did a segmentation to divide our users between their level of digitalisation and their entrepreneurial mindset.
We realised that our users are parents, so one of their motivations is to provide for their family. They are not very digital people and some prefer the traditional shopping method. They have experience shopping online, managing their bank accounts and use social networks.
Once we knew that our main objective was to satisfy the need for stock in a simple way as well as preventing them from catching the virus by going out on the streets. We started brainstorming until we came to the conclusion that we wanted to create a product that would supplant the traditional order pass, plus you can see the stock in real time and order at any time of the day.
We had a brainstorming session
In this session we focused together with the product team on finding the best solution for our users' needs. It was a challenge, because we also had to find a way not to break the rules imposed by the Peruvian government to stop the coronavirus and at the same time to calm the pain of the low sales that the company was experiencing. Quite a challenge.
Part of the results we obtained in this round of work together was the definition of the type of product our users needed, the architecture and the main flow of our MVP, it was a week of hard work, all very fast because we had the time against us.
Another important point we took into account was our success metrics, at the beginning of the project these were our objectives:
- Launch the MVP in 6 months
- 30% customer adoption in the first 6 months.
- 15k total sales through the alimarket channel in the first 6 months.
- 5% increase in order requests in the first 6 months.
- 10% increase in products added based on recommendations in the first 6 months.
We already had our definitions, then, what we had to do was to start making our idea tangible, we made a very basic user flow to give us, together with the development team, an idea of what we had to build. That's how we defined our user flow.
Once we had defined our user flow, we had to think about how to structure our screens, so we started to define our screens in low fidelity. We took local and global competitors as a reference in order not to invent the wheel in terms of experience and usability. In addition, we also looked at the applications that our users were already using to define certain structures so that they would be as familiar as possible and not complicate their use.
Then, we had to test our definition with our users, it was the key moment, because we would know if the user was satisfied with the work we had been doing for weeks. We started recruiting and it was quite a challenge, as it was particularly the first time I had done a usability test with users remotely.
We did a lot of testing before we started and the tool that worked best for us was Zoom, the user could share their screen and at the same time chat with us, it was the best. Then, it was time to start showing our product.
There was a lot of visual feedback, but in general the level of acceptance was huge, the users performed the tasks we gave them without any indication, and showed us their real interest in trying our product as soon as possible.
Then, we had to make our visual definition, for this, we relied on the UI team to start building our design system from this product, it was a very collaborative work with other areas and other roles.
Having the visual definition, we shared it with the development team and they started to build it and finally we were able to launch our MVP in 3 months.
This is one of the projects that taught me the most both professionally and personally. It opened my eyes to the importance of designing for everyone, ensuring that all users, regardless of their abilities, can access and benefit from the product. Through this project, I delved into issues such as accessibility and usability, understanding how crucial it is to create inclusive designs. Additionally, I learned about metrics and how they can be used to measure the effectiveness and reach of a design. This project covered a wide range of topics that significantly enriched my knowledge and skills. Ultimately, I am presenting one of the projects that have given me the most pride, a testament to the growth and learning I experienced throughout the process.
