Product Details Research
While completing my senior year of university part-time, I received an opportunity to intern at Wish full-time, and worked on features on both ends of the business, from Consumer to Marketplace & Logistics. As the team continuously grew in preparation for its IPO, I received my first chance to be treated like a full-time designer, take ownership of my work, and make an impact for over 90 million monthly active users and over 900K merchants worldwide.
TIMELINE
November 2020—December 2020
TEAMS
Consumer Core
CONTRIBUTIONS
Research & Synthesis
Overview
Throughout my college career in UW Design, something that was drilled into me was the importance of research and discovery in order to best empathize with our users and to best drive product direction forward. Although I moved on to become a product designer in my career, I still find that research-driven design has always been the ideal situation to advocate for when approaching my work.
When I joined Wish, only one primary UX researcher had joined our team. Throughout my time at Wish, I slowly became a part-time researcher throughout my internship, working on projects on our Consumer team that could help best identify product considerations and design deliverables that could best serve our customers and drive business success.
About Authentic Brands
Authentic Brands are a product segment within Wish that attempts to sell goods that have a recognizable brand name. Unlike most Wish products, these products are often reviewed internally to determine whether or not they are authentic to the brand offered.
For this project, I worked a 4-week research proposal that identified key problems and pain points that were occurring surrounded Branded products. My final deliverable became a research presentation that was presented to product and design teams working on Branded Products that were working on both ends of the marketplace.
My Presentation
Impact
Upon leaving the Consumer core team, the research report that was conducted was not just utilized to develop Jira tickets for future design deliverables. It got influence from both sides of the marketplace and it helped shaped the future vision for branded products across the company. While I left the team without being able to see any quantitative impact, I got many compliments after my presentation stating that this project helped them see better what it's like for Wish consumers to experience the platform, and that it made them recognize pitfalls in their own work as well.
Things I Learned
Scoping.
I think that one of the biggest challenges I learned as a designer was determining how to best scope my work and to deliver on time. In the past, I have often worked in teams where research was done collectively or delgated evenly, so learning to do the same amount of work to do your job. I learned to ask myself questions like, instead of developing a full-scale research study with 40 participants, would it be easier for me to get the same result with 10 instead?
Research is beneficial, but not a requirement to design.
Throughout my internship, I found myself advocating for more research and more attention to our user base out of a desire to advocate for features that were tailored better for our customers. I think although a research report like this helped me unocover user segmentations and a stronger understanding of our customers, it sort of made me realize . A company that has the backings of a research team is a privilege, and not a right, and a result research isn't tends to come in the back to design for users. and I often took note of the fact that of how to better be empathetic towards others.