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How designer can help long-established, traditional company with digital transformation.

01/05

Why I joined FamilyMart

I had worked in dot-com companies in Shanghai and Singapore for years, ranging from various B-end systems to C-end e-commerce. Back in Taiwan, where is more emphasis on hardware technology. How could I use my experience to change the lives of people here? Which company has a huge user base, is closely related to everyone's lives, and wants to put more effort on digital things?
FamilyMart (FM). Taiwan ranks second in the world in terms of proportion of convenience stores. My 3-year-old niece and 83-year-old grandma are both users, and 73% of Taiwanese are FamilyMart members. It has been dedicated to operating APPs for many years.
I don't want to just handover design as a design executor, but more as a design strategist, trying to change the company culture and workflow to see how design can bring benefits to users and the company. FM's desire for digital transformation and the positioning of new experience design team allowed me to get closer to the core and see how things work.
Next, let me tell you about my journey of trying to find and change myself to help big, old company with digital transformation (DX).

02/05

FamilyMart wants DX

According to the 2023 survey, 82.7% of consumers care about whether convenience stores have “easy-to-use apps”. FamilyMart is paying more and more attention to operating the FamilyMart APP and the company’s DX. But so far, we still have several big problems:

  1. Many people still have an immature understanding of digital products. They apply offline sales method directly to the online mall.

  2. The workflow is lengthy and involves many departments.

  3. Different departments hire different external vendors to meet digital needs, resulting in a disjointed APP experiences and inefficiencies. 72% of users’ negative comments are that the APP had low performance and could not even be opened or used.

About Taiwan FamilyMart

  1. Established since 1988

  2. Number of convenience stores: 4,253

  3. Number of FM app users: 8 million, about 35% of Taiwanese have FamilyMart app

  4. DAU: 1.1 million

  5. The user experience team built at the end of 2022, and currently has 5 designers.

FamilyMart app’s ratings on Appstore

Things are actually more complicated

​Before joining FamilyMart, I expected to spend more time communicating with non-digital natives and colleagues across generations. And it’s not just design that needs to be considered, but also cost control, office politics, etc. But things are actually more complicated:

  1. Many people have worked here for 20 years or more. They have methods of doing things that have been in place for many years. What’s more, it’s human nature not to want to change. No one wants to listen to the new kid on the block.

  2. Meteo Fall. It’s not waterfall or agile development. It’s a joke name from Japan IT industry. From bosses, stakeholders to product managers, they say, "This is what I think customers want"; and demand that it be built immediately. After being hit by meteorites a few times, I am wondering if Meteo Fall is bad ? Is it possible that sometimes this powerful external push can push a product toward unexpected growth? (more detail about Meteo Fall : https://eiki.hatenablog.jp/entry/meteo_fall)

  3. A small change affects everything: In dot-com companies, our main product are APP. Although different departments have different considerations, we have the same goal, which is to make the APP good. However, in FM, even an simple action might will involve to many subsidiaries and external vendors, who have conflicting targets.

Let me share some cases of
this ongoing digital journey below…

03/05

How designers can bring about change ? — Design system

Delivering a design system (DS) doesn't have an end date. Just like my career life, delivering a DS doesn't have an end date. Having created and worked with design systems of various sizes at previous companies. It is my fourth time lead a DS. What’s different ?

Results achieved so far（From September 2023）

  1. Reduce design iteration time by 75%.

  2. 83% design page coverage.

  3. 44% of PMs and stakeholders have started using Figma to make proposals, saying that the output quality is better and the time is reduced.

Intro

Jared Spool divides company's DX process into 5 stages. In my opinion, FM is in its second stage - Spot UX Design: An emerging design team struggles to deliver products and services with improved user experiences.
In the first two months after joining, I got to know each designer's characteristics and product design workflow. And then I proposed to supervisor to redesign DS, replace the existing UI kit, and add UX with usage instructions. The targets of DS are:

  1. Enable designers and stakeholders to do design correctly.

  2. Achieve consistent user experience across all digital touch points.

  3. Deliver design and product work faster and more accurately.

My Role & Activities

  1. Project owner, I report to head of E-Retail department.

  2. Managed the backlog of everything that needed to be built, finally delivered app & desktop DS and will implement in all touch points.

  3. I technically lead 4 junior designers, review all delivered components, and make sure everyone know what they are doing. We work in weekly sprints and have newsletter to communicate to stakeholders what we delivered.

  4. Share vision and conduct workshop with stakeholders.

Challenge 1 : Help designers without much experience improve their design skills

Compared to my previous teams, the designers here are all junior. Not only making sure DS can be delivered on time, but also thinking about how to help them grow into what they want to be.

  1. Make things work out of interpersonal and political support. Building a DS is as much a political exercise as a creative one. Doing DS on day one, I would probably be hated. Before that, I built relationship with team crews, understood the way they used to do things and every designer’s charcrastics, and then proposed DS to the supervisor and got support from the leadership.

  2. Assign work based on component and designer's characteristics. Some components are more UI-oriented, some are more UX-oriented, and the same goes for designers. Plus, different components have different “personalities” and they will present varying degrees of implementation barriers, and so will designers. Thus, having designer doing his right component will improve results. For example, I assigned a designer who has a very persistent goal and is good at making reports to do “Nav bar”. Because making “Nav bar” compatible in all scenarios and easy to reuse requires more careful designer with better UX skills. At the same time, because “Nav bar” involves all stakeholders, this person must also be good at communication and able to persist. The last thing is to trust team members, and team members will repay your trust.

  3. Make intentions unambiguous. Demos are provided straight away, along with detailed workflows. Be strict about design results while preventing them from becoming frustrated by making mistakes. Ask them why they do what they do to help them think and understand more, ultimately improving design skills.

Challenge 2 : We’ve always done it this way

One day, a PM handover a request about integrating multiple shopping carts into only one cart to me.

Me : Is your PRD ready?
PM: What is PRD? We don’t do this thing here.
Me: Then, could you please give me iteration plan and plan about function and scope?
PM: Em, Why you want this, don’t it just a couple of words can be delivered？We’ve always done it this way.

This conversation happened frequently in my first few months at FM. Many stakeholders resist change because they fear the unknown or are comfortable with existing processes. Also, people don’t know what they don’t know. Most colleagues didn’t know about product design, human-centered etc. This made it difficult to drive design. What have I done to move from “We’ve always done it this way” to a new way of working and operating?

  1. Mapping and relationship building. Firstly, understood our surroundings and the mechanisms in FM that stymied innovation and slow progress in order to navigate product complexity and cross-functional relationships. Secondly, let the locals get used to designers. We are there to help, such as providing Figma and DS training support. It helps us increase colleague engagement and adoption of these new tools, thereby driving efficiency and productivity improvements.

  2. Make DS be approachable and intuitive to all users. First, we would like to invite all stakeholders to use Figma. After knowing them use PPT to draw prototypes from PNGs for many years, I found that one-step change is impractical. Also, our goal was to get everyone using DS, not Figma. Finally, DS are delivered in dual version: Figma and PNG.

  3. Align and co-create. The bad thing that can happen is that stakeholders feel disconnected to the DS. Provide an easy to use feedback loop for them to add things or request new things from the DS.

Figma classes and design system feedback table

Following is the case about how DS and new workflow bring different.

FM APP Redesign

FM APP are maintained by multiple business teams with inconsistent user experience. Our goal is to make consumers develop the habit of online shopping on the FamilyMart app, while at the same time it can bring a smoother experience for offline store shopping and services.

Phase 1 Results (two weeks after launch in April 2024)

  1. Product card browsing rate increased by 4 times, click-through rate increased by 1 times

  2. New search function, usage rate 7%

  3. E-Mall conversion rate increased by 27.8%

  4. Each business team began to get used to whether it complies with the design system and whether it has a better user experience.

Challenge

Get every business team to agree with the revision. What was more difficult than design was getting everyone to accept the revision. What they worried about was that changes would bring about a drop in performance. Their only way was to make things bigger and display forward. What have we done ?

  1. Design period: We compiled offline/online sales and app usage data, and conducted external focus interviews and AB interviews with the company's internal business teams. It showed that the current approach had not brought much benefit, and our new design gave everyone equal opportunity to be exposed, and it’s in line with the expectations of users and the company.

  2. After going online: conducted AB test based on the data and then quickly optimised the page.

04/05

How can designers change to make product design go smoothly here？

Digital transformation is a big challenge for FM that has to deal with hierarchies and rethink processes that have been used for years. However, I doubt DX is 100% correct ? “The rational is real, and the real is rational”, there must be the right things so that FM can survive in the market for almost 40 years.
Do you still remember “Meteo Fall” ? The information gap created by experience and perspective makes us think differently. The leadership has more experience in the retail food industry than I do. The meteorites I saw might be meteors to them.
Furthermore, FM is not a startup or dot-com company. They cannot easily follow agile development framework. So, during the transition period, how can designers smoothly promote design with colleagues and the leadership with different mindset ?

Tips

  1. Avoid pronouns and confirm noun definitions. For example, in FM, it is customary to say that this project requires "feature abcd". But I have already merged "feature abcd" into information architecture. What I said is "tab abc", which causes PM to think that I have not done "feature d".

  2. Manage expectations early and often. At FM, the work output cycle = reporting and meeting cycle, but we do product design based on the product development cycle. What will this time gap cause? For example, a design that is only rough draft will be presented in the meeting, and because the people attending the meeting usually are only the leadership. This often deviates the product from its original direction, not only requiring rework but also a high probability of delay.

  3. Discuss at a similar level of information. Confirm the goals and reasons behind the boss's needs. Why does he believe that doing this can achieve goals? (Although bosses usually don’t say that much)

  4. Business data driven. The language of user experience strategy needs to be the language of business strategy. Leaders don't want to keep changing proposals, they want a proposal that cannot be questioned. Too often, stakeholders ignore data they have in favor of gut feelings or assumptions. Use that data to inform our designs from the start. It can help our design outcome not be questioned by bosses, and can help bosses persuade others.

05/05

Take Away

This digital transformation is still on the way, but I have already gained a lot.

  1. Change mindset and be resilient. Being a first-generation product designer requires a high level of resiliency. It is essential to set expectations knowing that I am on a team with nonexistent UX maturity; I am a digital transformer, not a designer. Reminding these every day will help maintain sanity.

  2. Digital transformation doesn’t mean turning a company directly into a dot-com company, so it cannot be copied directly. It is neither suitable nor likely to succeed. Non-disruptive approaches and communication in their shoes will help to build strong relationships and make things smooth and work.

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