Oct 2021 - Dec 2021
IOS and Android App
User Experience Designer
AirAsia is a leading travel and financial platform company in the Asia Pacific, providing air transport, travel and lifestyle products, as well as financial services. On 25 August 2021, the food delivery platform of AirAsia Super App, AirAsia Food simultaneously launched its services in two key cities of Malaysia - Johor Bahru and Melaka offering customers a huge choice of meals from a plethora of cuisines available in Malaysia.
In October 2021, AirAsia Food Product Design Team collaborated with BLISS Interactive Studio to empower merchants to engage with in-app customers.
I’m the UX designer for this project. I collaborated with 2 senior UX designers, 2 project engineers, and the project manager from BLISS Interactive Studio throughout the entire project. We were under the supervision and collaboration of the lead product manager from AirAsia.
If a merchant has a promotion, new menu item or other updates - customer has to open another app and look for that store.
Merchants are more than just a storefront. They want ways to connect with their customers, share their stories and build loyal relationships.
Yes! we eventually decided we should probably couple the experience and not have a separate opt-in experience to get these communications from customer favorite stores.
It was an avenue that we explored at the beginning of this project but we quickly realized that AirAsia Food is a feature of AirAsia Super App which means it is a very loud channel. Therefore, not all customers have push notifications turned on and there are already a lot of push notifications being sent by AirAsia.
Merchants can update their contents and messages such as “this week’s hot item” or provide a tweet on their storefront. We realized that this solution is not scalable and so embedded on the storefront level. Customers have to go to the store to see the status update.
What if the content is not about a particular item? What if merchants want to share their updated store hours? This solution is too contextual and relies on more back-end engineering exploration. We concluded it is not a potential solution.
What would stories look like on AirAsia Food? We had this idea on a late Design Sprint and realized that it’s definitely a solution we are looking for due to the familiar pattern customer have seen in many of their favorite apps.
We wanted to make sure that there’s an entry point into stories on the feed so that customers can view their favorite restaurant’s stories at the app launch or while browsing their feed.
We decided to use a carousel as a preview of the story on the feed where customers could start to see the content of the story and tap into the story to see it in full-screen mode.
Merchant’s stories will be ranked in the order of customer favorite stores. We added on showing stories from stores nearby in local neighborhoods so customers could continue their experience after reaching the end of their favorite store’s stories.
Another entry point we want to make is from the actual storefront so customers can view these stories directly from a store when they are active or unread through a notification on the right corner.
There are two different types of content which are custom content created by the merchant and programmatically created by AirAsia.
Both custom and programmatic content are designed to link with different campaigns from AirAsia or local neighborhoods so that merchants can join in these marketing campaigns to share their brand messages.
We run a test from 10 different merchants in 1 month to see how they use the story feature to create their custom content. Here is the most created content by these merchants.
For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted the Incremental impact for these metrics.
This is the third time I’m working on a project in which their end users are Malaysian but I’m still getting so much Wow moment after finding something new about the users. I realized that removing the self from the context and focusing entirely on the user is the key element to the success of this project.
They only become clearer as you work on them. You just have to get started!
We explored so many solutions throughout the entire project. The story solution only came across after a long collaboration with the engineering and merchant team. If we didn’t listen to their concerns and evolve the tools they worked with, our Story Feature would never be implemented in production.
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