Empowering New Local SMEs to Compete in the Fierce Bali Online Food Market

Role

UI Designer

Team

UX Designer

Platform

Android, iOS

Timeline

2022

PROJECT OVERVIEW

BACKGROUND

The rapid growth of SMEs in Denpasar City, with 8.71 million units in 2022, highlights the city's thriving business environment. However, these small businesses face significant challenges, particularly in the highly competitive market. Many SMEs struggle with market competition, which affects their ability to stand out among numerous competitors. Additionally, the rising costs of marketing make it difficult for these businesses to effectively promote their products and services. These hurdles, combined with other issues like limited human resources and access to funding, hinder the growth and success of SMEs in Denpasar City.

OUTCOME

Empowering local businesses to connect directly with their target market, starting with their immediate community. By enabling communities to provide valuable feedback in the form of trust scores, businesses can gain valuable insights and build stronger relationships with their customers.

OUTPUT

Develop a local map platform tailored for emerging SMEs. This platform will allow potential customers to effortlessly discover nearby businesses using advanced search and map features. By showcasing essential business information like location, product offerings, and operating hours, we aim to help new local businesses expand their customer base within their community.

GOAL

Assist new SMEs to reduce the costs of marketing through online and build awareness of the local business in near area

PROBLEM SPACE

To understand more about this project feature, I create a simple guide to define who's our target we'll serve by using feature strategy framework.

We breakdown the target more deeply to specific who's our target that we want to serve. We found there are 3 types of that. Eventually we’ll focus on the first and the second one.`

After conducted user interviews with our target and got some of insights from them. Long short story, we got the red lines and framing the pain points clearly. So, here it is

PAIN POINTS

Here’s some highlighted pain points that we found from our target as new SME’s in the Denpasar Timur, Bali area.

1. Overcrowded Market:With the rapid growth of SMEs, the market has become saturated, making it difficult for businesses to differentiate themselves and attract customers especially on online food platforms such as Grab Food or GoFood.
2. Limited Brand Visibility:In a crowded marketplace, local SMEs may struggle to gain visibility and recognition, especially against larger competitors with more established brands.
3. High Marketing Costs:Effective marketing strategies can be expensive, and many local SMEs may lack the budget to invest in the necessary advertising, digital marketing, or promotional activities to compete.

Now that we’ve identified the pain points, let’s turn them into a clear problem statement:

🧩Problem Statement

TL;DR

How do I know this is a real problem not a symptoms?

Based on the insight that we found before, when I bought an earphone in Bintang. Bintang is a gadget equipment store that selling everything you need for your gadget or smartphone. Long short story, after I paid the earphone, The cashier said to me to help them to review their product and share of your buy experience on our store and upload it on Google Reviews. And I asked her “Why do you need to do this to your customer?” and she said We need customer reviews for our store and the products that we sell here and hopefully they'll recommend our store to their connections (friends, family, etc).

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VARIABLES

We've learned that there are a few things that drive business owners to reach their goals. Our research shows that it's super important for local businesses to get noticed in the first three months. Being seen and known by potential customers is the first step to turning them into real customers.

Consideration & Trade Off

"The decision why we don't encourage them through social media? because we want to focus on the local community and neighborhood. Being in a large market space makes it difficult for local Balinese businesses to compete even at the mid-to-low end of the scale. Capital is one of the things that plays a big role in staying afloat. With that, we try to reduce the distance between potential buyers and the local business itself which will eventually result in a relationship of trust with each other which is much more expensive"

SOLUTION SPACE

DESIGN OPPORTUNITY

From the research, data collection and intentions carried out, we identify opportunities that can be done in our design using the HMW framework.

How Might We:

Make the local business more visible to people around the business stand?
Decrease business owner effort by reduce the advertisement cost?
Disseminate information about business products easily through neighborhood?

SYNTHESIS: CRAFT JOURNEY MAPPING

We analyzed feedback from user interviews and visualized it using a customer journey map. This helped us pinpoint exact areas where users encounter difficulties from current workaround and identify opportunities that we can improve.

Business Owner Workaround

Discovery Local Business by Customer

CRAFT THE EXPERIENCE

OUTPUT

1. Embedding data into Local Search

Starting with the "Sekitar" page, the community can find anything around their area by enter the keywords and AI will answer promptly. If the keywords contain 'Place' and something relevant location, Chaca will guide you through local map.

2. Find it right away near you

Imagine your local business as a hidden gem waiting to be discovered. By showcasing business finest products and services that you can offer to community, get step inside and experience something truly special.

3. Manner Score Attributes

We know as community, experience is an important thing for so that we can share our story to small community (friends, family, etc).

4. Build your own audience and get trust from them

After serving your community to the best of your ability, don't forget to seek community feedbacks. This way, can help business grow and improve the products more quickly.

5. Don’t make it personal! Share your experience back to the community

Customer can share their feedback not only to business owner but they able to share experience to their small community.

RESULTS & TAKEAWAYS

After launched the feature for several months, we got a good signal that local merchants give a support to us by registered as our local partner. However, we contingently improve this feature by asking feedbacks for both (business owner and customers). And do iterate based on it.

As long the feature running out, we got several milestone that said:

More than 20+ merchants registered to be our local merchants
Our local community traffic increase rapidly where 5% of users share their location and experience

Learnings

Building a product is super hard. Every individual involved in the project must share the same vision and end goal. By collaborating with other departments like PM and the Engineering Team, we can gain different perspectives on how impactful the product is and how feasible certain features are.
As a designer, learning how to get buy-in from people like PMs, Lead Engineers, and other stakeholders is a key factor that helps me move forward with my ideas.
After several months of running this feature, we decided to discontinue this feature for certain reasons.