Cultivating Engagement
Reimagining the customer experience to support shopping journeys and goals
Context
Joining as the first VP of Design during a pivotal turnaround, I encountered a business grappling with declining daily active users (DAUs), poor browse depth, and stagnant conversions. My first major challenge was to craft a transformative design vision that could inspire both customers and employees while avoiding disruptions to ongoing workstreams. This was an opportunity to showcase design as a strategic asset to the organization and to establish design’s voice in the executive suite.
Key metrics painted a clear picture of the challenges:
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Engagement Trends: Decreasing DAUs and shorter session times signaled waning customer interest and eroded trust in the platform.
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Browsing Depth: Limited exploration beyond landing pages highlighted the need for better product discovery and content strategy to engage users more deeply.
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Conversions: Despite rising search traffic, conversion rates remained flat, indicating a disconnect between customer intent and experience, with an unmet need for cohesive pathways.
Customer insights and internal analyses revealed several critical gaps:
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Perception Gaps: Many customers doubted that Wish offered products they wanted or found browsing uninspiring due to the lack of engaging pathways and personalized content.
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Demographic Disparity: While 80% of customers were in North America and Northwestern Europe, 90% of merchants were based in China, creating mismatched expectations regarding product presentation and quality.
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Competitive Pressure: Competitors like Shein and Temu were rising rapidly, prompting internal pressure to emulate their dense, visually intense designs tailored for a different cultural context. This tension underscored the need for Wish to differentiate its approach.
Our vision needed to:
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Address the "messy middle" of decision-making to cultivate shopping intent, improve conversions, and deepen engagement with the platform.
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Align with Western customers’ scanning and browsing habits for clarity, trust-building, and easier navigation.
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Inspire trust through consistent branding, professional presentation, and elevated design quality.
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Create a foundation for long-term innovation while addressing immediate organizational challenges.
An overview of the brand elements that were waiting to be used in the product. While visually compelling, we needed to build on these ideas to support effective shopping.
Snapshot
Wish, a leading eCommerce platform, faced post-pandemic challenges: declining engagement, shallow browsing, and flat conversions. As the new VP of Design, I was tasked with crafting a bold vision to transform the shopping experience, revive metrics, and inspire employees. This role required a holistic understanding of customer behavior, internal collaboration, and rapid execution to deliver meaningful outcomes. It also involved addressing systemic issues while presenting a vision that could unify the organization’s efforts.
To address these challenges, I built a small "tiger team" tasked with defining a vision rooted in insights from key metrics, research, and customer personas. Our work ultimately laid the foundation for collaboratively creating a new strategic roadmap, shifting organizational priorities, and igniting excitement across the company—from executive leadership to individual contributors. By blending design strategy and storytelling, this initiative demonstrated how design could serve as a transformative force for business success.
Outcomes
Our vision delivered measurable and cultural impact:
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Strategic Impact:
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Crafted a powerful vision that earned praise from executives and the board of directors, providing a clear direction for innovation.
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Prompted the CPO to realign quarterly planning, prioritizing the vision to drive organizational focus and shift towards customer-centric outcomes.
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Sparked new product development and experimentation plans that integrated design thinking principles, laying the groundwork for meaningful user engagement improvements.
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Cultural Impact:
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Boosted morale and confidence within the design team by showcasing the strategic value of their work and how it aligned with the company’s larger goals.
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Elevated excitement and optimism company-wide following an inspiring presentation at the all-hands meeting, reflecting positively on employee engagement and commitment.
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Reinforced trust in leadership’s ability to steer the company towards a brighter, customer-centric future, creating momentum for ongoing collaboration.
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Organizational Influence:
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Shifted how product and engineering teams spoke about customer goals, embracing frameworks like Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) and focusing on customer intent and longer-term loyalty.
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Encouraged broader adoption of user-centric thinking and helped foster a shared language around customer insights, strengthening cross-functional collaboration and alignment.
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Positioned design as a strategic partner, influencing decisions at both operational and executive levels.
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Assumptions
To guide the vision, we grounded ourselves in five core assumptions:
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Support real customer shopping behaviors:
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Enhance product discovery and support multi-session shopping journeys that reflect actual customer habits, particularly for treasure-seekers and deal-hunters, who make up a significant portion of Wish’s user base.
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Adapt for Western audience sensibilities:
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Create clean, scannable layouts that simplify navigation and build trust, offering a more intuitive path to decision-making while aligning with Western browsing habits.
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Align design with brand values:
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Integrate branding elements into the product experience to convey professionalism, consistency, and polish, fostering a cohesive identity.
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Accelerate impact:
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Operate with a lean team and prioritize rapid prototyping to influence planning cycles and secure resource allocation effectively. Emphasize agility to adapt to feedback quickly.
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Design for differentiation:
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Leverage Wish’s unique value proposition and focus on customer intent to differentiate from competitors and establish a distinct market position.
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Company
Role
VP of Product Design
Team
Project team: 5
Total Team: 30
Research
To develop a fresh perspective, we pursued a multi-pronged research approach:
1. Internal Insights:
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Immersed ourselves in usability studies, personas, and customer feedback to understand top pain points and motivators.
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Identified gaps in usability and customer engagement through qualitative and quantitative analysis, linking insights directly to shopping intent and browsing challenges.
2. External Studies:
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Leveraged Google’s "Messy Middle" research to explore how customers navigate the cyclical phases of exploration and consideration, giving us a clearer understanding of decision-making delays and psychological friction.
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Introduced the JTBD framework, enabling a deeper understanding of customer motivations and aligning designs with specific goals customers aimed to accomplish. Read more about JTBD here.
3. Competitive Analysis:
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Benchmarked US, EU, and Asian competitors to identify best practices, pitfalls, and innovative ideas that could inform our strategy.
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Documented patterns in a shared Figma sandbox for collaborative exploration, creating a rich repository of inspiration and cautionary tales for the team.
4. Experience Gaps:
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Highlighted Wish’s over-reliance on impulse buying while neglecting deeper shopping goals and longer decision-making cycles.
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Found personalization to be limited and disconnected from browsing behavior, offering room for substantial improvement in targeting and engagement.
A new model of shopping and current and proposed design analysis
An example flow and story for a persona.
We kept early sketches loose to avoid locking into old patterns.
A view of the shopping flow that helps someone pick up with their previous shopping for a smart watch (click to see details).
We thought through levels of effort to deliver our concept, to plan for an evolution to the complete concept (click to see details).
Phase 3: Refinement
As concepts matured, we:
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Established an updated style guide to align branding with product design, ensuring consistency and professionalism.
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Built interactive prototypes that brought shopping journeys to life, providing stakeholders with a tangible sense of the vision.
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Developed mild, medium, and spicy design options to balance ambition with engineering feasibility, fostering constructive cross-team discussions.
Phase 4: Storytelling
We crafted a focused JTBD narrative highlighting a customer returning to find a great deal on a smartwatch. This clear, relatable story resonated with stakeholders, illustrating how the vision could solve real customer problems and align with business goals. The narrative approach simplified complex design concepts, making them more accessible to non-design audiences.
Design
Our design process unfolded in four deliberate phases:
Phase 1: Conceptualization
We framed design work around shopping stories, with each designer developing JTBD narratives for specific personas. This approach encouraged the team to focus on user goals and decision-making journeys rather than isolated features, making the vision inherently customer-driven.
Phase 2: Low-Fidelity Sketching
Sketching encouraged improvisation, collaboration, and rapid iteration. Key activities included:
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Sharing ideas during regular feedback sessions to foster innovation and ensure alignment.
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Borrowing and reinterpreting patterns to push boundaries and inspire novel solutions.
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Experimenting with innovative shopping modules, cross-selling opportunities, and enhanced discovery paths.
Building Consensus and Influence
Securing alignment required ongoing engagement:
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Internal Collaboration: Regular feedback sessions with key leaders ensured alignment and buy-in at every stage.
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Executive Presentation: The CPO invited me to present the vision at the executive staff meeting, where it received unanimous praise and excitement for its clarity and actionable insights.
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Board Presentation: A customer-centric story inspired confidence among board members, reinforcing the strategic value of design as a driver for turnaround efforts.
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Company-Wide Communication: Sharing the vision at the all-hands meeting boosted morale, as reflected in enthusiastic chat discussions, post-meeting feedback, and a noticeable uptick in cross-departmental engagement.
Final Takeaways
This case exemplifies the strategic power of design:
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Inspiration: Customer-centered storytelling fostered organizational optimism and alignment, galvanizing employees at all levels.
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Transformation: The vision reframed strategy and planning, paving the way for improved customer experiences and business outcomes while creating a shared sense of purpose.
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Cultural Shift: Design influenced how the company approached customer intent and experience, driving cross-functional collaboration, trust, and momentum.
Through this work, I demonstrated how design can act as a catalyst for business transformation, customer trust, and organizational alignment, creating a lasting impact that extends beyond the product experience.
Examining how the current and proposed designs would support different customer intentions
