NTUC | Singapore’s everyday’s food app
NTUC FairPrice is a well known and trusted brand in Singapore. It is largely known for its grocery and insurance business. In reality, it is a multi-verticals social enterprises holding company. With the pace of digitalisation, NTUC started its own transformation journey and re-looking its strategy and positioning in the markets. The first step towards a consolidated business strategy is the launch of FairPrice "omni" landing page that allows multiple business units to leverage on each other while serving customers in its journey.
Problems to solve
NTUC Fairprice has set out to build a super app platform from a single purpose app (Grocery). The team set out to plan for a design that can support the business ambition and allow design to scale. When we talked to our Shoppers, we realised there is an entrenched perception of FairPrice Group predominantly as a grocery business. In contrast, NTUC consists of social enterprises from health, childcare, daily essentials, cooked food to financial services. The team reviewed existing Information architecture, UI components which need to be tweaked, redesigned or added to support the user experience and future proof the design. Lastly, we look into refreshing a out-dated-looking visual designs.
My Role
I led the requirement workshops with stakeholders, set the design goal and work needs to be done with the support of three designers, one Researcher and a UX Copywriter on the new landing screen. I stopped working on the project during the detailed visual design phase as the app started to be built. The app launched in August 2021.
DISCOVERY
Stakeholders interviews & Customer research
Understanding the problems to solve
- To understand customer's mental model, we Ran card sorting, qualitative interviews to understand the current and to be state of customers from a information schematics point of view.
- To understand business goals and aspirations, we ran stakeholder interviews on what are their ideal states, and vision towards the design and app
Our Learning
- Improve usability, taxonomy (navigation) across the platform for our customers
- Using tile design to provide contextual experience while allowing business, tech and design flexibility and ability to scale up
- Identifying common services and components. E.g. Memberships, rewards Vs Promotions, vouchers
- Visual design to strengthen branding, locality and communicate new business direction
THE APPROACH
Design Goals
Functional Intent
- Provide ease of navigation, supporting different user intents
- Allow users to be efficient in their tasks
- Allow users to discover new experiences or values
- Allow design to scale and support business ambitions such as personalisation and monetization in the future
- Improve the overall user experience progressively overtime
Emotional Intent
- Provide a sense of change and excitement
- Provide space to delight our customer
Hyper-local & vibrancy
From both the stakeholders and customer interviews, we get a theme surrounding the perception that NTUC is a brand that inspires trust, everything Singaporean-like. From the stakeholders there is also a desire to “catch up” to digital race and being presented as modern and being relevant to the new audience without losing the value of being “a local brand for Singaporeans”
The visual design focuses on amplifying our branding values. It builds on the emotional bond of humanity, all-inclusiveness & genuineness of Singapore. In addition, the design team uses visuals to set the tone of change by introducing a mood of vibrancy.
To build emotional connections with customers, we use everyday illustrations of Singapore, including day, night and our diverse festivals. Celebrating distinctness of everyday life in Singapore
NTUC is a brand that inspires trust, everything Singaporean-like.
Design explorations and iterations
We explored and iterate various possible way that balance user’s intent and business ambitions. Key considerations are:
1/ Designed for user intent
A well designed landing page will consider the customer journey on and off screens.
2/ Support omni customer journey
One of the important business ambitions the design put into consideration is communicating the to-be business ambition, designing the customer's journey pathway for more verticals in an omni channel world.
3/ Design for scale
From the beginning we worked towards creating a scalable design component. The components were coded so that we had a single source of truth that everyone can refer to. The documentation also covered additional design principles.
4/ Allow business visibility for new services
NTUC enterprise consists of many businesses. While not all businesses will be onboard to the new super app ecosystem, we have ensured the design can cater for new business being introduced.
5/ Support user transition (change management)
The design prepares the shopper there be multiple "worlds" of experiences in future.
One of the key tasks of a landing page is to direct users quickly to their core user task. We learnt that users use the app with two main intent. One is task driven, another is browsing. Majority of Shoppers, came to the app with a clear list of item(s) to buy. Knowing in the future; the app will grow beyond Grocery, the intent at landing page needs to be clear so as to support Shopper's current habit. This thinking shapes the way the screen is designed. How our shoppers might navigate and understand our visuals design played an important part in our design thinking towards screen structure and layout.
Design for impact
The landing page design was launched in August 2021. The first week of release to a 30% user base, saw a reduction of 4% drop in bounce rates compared to the previous design. Most exciting part was we saw a 11x increase in traffic to the 1 year old in store experience hence achieving one of the most important intent - highlighting new businesses and supporting our omni's strategy. The design has indeed helped to direct shoppers clearly to our intended shopping design path that resulted in lower bounce rate.
