NATE : South Korean Web Portal

NATE is a South Korean web portal, developed by SK Communications. I joined SK Communications in Jul of 2010 and worked as a product manager for one and half year. At that time, NATE had just been served on the desktop web and mobile WAP. NATE desktop web had the third most visitors following NAVER and DAUM in South Korea and NATE WAP was also highly selling paied contents under the support of South Korea’s number one telecom operator SK Telecom but the situation was changing rapidly since the introduction of the iPhone in Korea in late 2009, the Korean web market in 2010 was undergoing a massive transformation into the mobile age. NATE should had been moving rapidly to develop a mobile web and app for smartphones in the era of smartphone.

Getting Started

In 2010, I continued to improve the NATE Mobile Web homepage because I belonged to a team that is responsible for NATE mobile web. But as the team reorganized to provide a seamless user experience on the Desktop Web, the Mobile Web, and the Mobile App, I started designing NATE for these three platforms in 2011. Since the mobile app was still in its infancy, we launched a project to reorganize the NATE Desktop Web and Mobile Web Homepage in 2011. I’ll talk about this interesting project.

Research

In order to know the problems of our product accurately and to improve the user experience through the user-centered design, various user researches must be done concurrently. I will briefly explain the purpose and method of each research that we had conducted and the conclusion of the research below.

# 1. Traffic Analysis

Since the NATE homepage was the gateway to various services of NATE such as news, search, mail, community board, shopping and music, it was important to display each service attractively. So, I analyzed the traffic in two ways, such as the number of the NATE homepage visitors and clicks of each area in the NATE homepage. The problems identified through traffic analysis were:

The NATE Desktop Web

• We need a strategy to recover the per-capita PV, which has been stagnant and continues to decline compared to competitors.
• When comparing UV by age, it is seen that there is a small inflow of less than 10 users and a decrease of users of mid-20s, and most of the ages are similar to the previous year.
• The number of clicks on the desktop web homepage area is concentrated in the communication (mail, message), connect, and profile areas, and clicks occur in the order of news > search > other areas.

The NATE Mobile Web

• In the case of mobile web, the rise of UV is continuing, and traffic growth rate of the Cyworld (minihompy) in May is high.
• The number of clicks on the Mobile Web the ‘news’ area is overwhelmingly higher than that of other areas, followed by the ‘connect’ area.
• In August last year, only 22% of users were using the Mobile Web, and the dropout rate was 78%.

# 2. Survey

We commissioned the Embrain, an online research institute in South Korea and conducted the survey to know how users were feeling about the NATE Homepage. I created a draft survey questionnaire and shared with the Embrain. We completed the final version together. The survey was conducted on panels held by the Embrain. Here are the facts we learned from 1,000 respondents:

The NATE Desktop Web

• The satisfaction rate of NATE Desktop Web Homepage and the rate of setting as browser start page is lower than other portal web.
• The most important attribute is Provide ‘favorite services(mail, search, news, mini hompy)’, ‘useful information’ and ‘configuration that is convenient to use ‘.
• The most uncomfortable element is ‘crowded because there is a lot of unnecessary contents’.

The NATE Mobile Web

• User needs the improvement of loading speed of homepage, seamless UI environment and improvement of content area.
• 59% of smartphone owners have used the NATE Mobile Web in the last 3 months, 8% have not used it in the past 3 months, 33% have never used it.
• Main usage reason is ‘Checking my news’ and ‘Time killing’.

# 3. Interview

I’ve also conducted user interviews in collaboration with the UX team. If my product team explained the purpose of the interview to the UX team and asked for the conducting the interview, the UX team cooperated with the product team to decide the interview scenario. The interview was conducted in the following manner.

• 9 total interviewee(each 3 loyal users in the NATE, the NAVER, the DAUM)
• Observing pattern of usual smartphone usage
• Perform 7 tasks belonging to 4 areas (personalization, search, news, contents) of the NATE Mobile web homepage, conduct surveys and interviews
• Product Reaction Cards • SUS(System Usability Scale) • Effectiveness / ease of learning / efficiency of use / satisfaction Testing

Interview, April 2011 , The Product Reaction Cards Test, April 2011

I was able to learn various user research methods from the UX team. In particular, the results of the product reaction cards test were interesting.

• The results of the Product Reaction Cards Test showed the NATE is related to amusements and differentiation such as cards of ‘friendly’, ‘fun’, ‘Easy to be close’, ‘creative’, ‘progressive’ and ‘fresh’.
• Also, there are a lot of expressions that showed difficulties to use such as ‘spawning’, ‘difficult to use’ and ‘confusing’.
• In other words, the NATE gives the impression of play and time-killing rather than practicality. The way of expressing is “new and creative,” but it shows that user feels a lot of frustration and distraction.

# 4. Competitive Analysis

We also analyzed our competitors, such as the NAVER and the Daum through the above three methods. Among other things, the efforts of competitors to reflect the rapidly evolving technology of mobile web on their mobile web interactions were impressive. As a result, we could decide to adopt the swiping interaction for each content area through this analysis. The original documents had been written in Korean so I translated those into English.

Based on the results of the research, the Mobile Web and the Desktop Web would be reorganized as follows.

The NATE Desktop Web

1. Reorganization of the complex contents on the below area and renovation for fatigue
2. Maintain the top configuration of and enhance news, minihompy, search service
3. Minimization of structural changes to maintain existing users’ tasks

The NATE Mobile Web

1. Reorganization from existing service list structure to content display centered structure
2. Enhance social networking tasks by creating the second page
3. Attempts for just mobile-specific elements(Content & Interaction)

Wireframes

The next step was to organize the problems and solutions shared through research into wireframe the mock-up forms and report them to decision makers. In particular, since the Homepage of the Web Portal worked as a gateway to dozens of sub-services, close cooperation with individual service representatives was essential. I held wireframes and went to the individual service representatives to discuss with them from time to time and modified those. This makes eliminate the risk that the solid structure, which I built in wireframe that will change later. I’ll also include a sample of low fidelity wireframes to give you a sense of the overall feel.

Mockups and A/B Testing

Based on the definition of wireframe and interaction, we started creating mockups with our visual designers. Sometimes, while product designers built wireframes, visual designers have also made their own higly fidelity mockups for A/B testing. I’ll show you a sample below. It’s about the personalization area on top of the Mobile Web with many complex elements.

This mock-up was delivered and A / B testing was conducted for the product team and stakeholders. As a result, although one of these was not final, A / B Testing suggested that the top area should not be organized in a way to enumerate the buttons and the tab style is preferred, but the tab naming needs to be clarified. I’ll include a final mockups to give you a good sense of the overall look and feel.

Wrapping up

After mockup work, it was then released after the development and the quality test in the second half of 2011. Users were generally satisfied with the improved user experience on the Desktop Web and Mobile Web, and I continued to monitor it.

I think it was a kind of luck that I got a chance to design this large web site that had over 70 million daily PV(Page View)s, 6 million daily UV(Unique Visitor)s and the multi platforms in the ara of the transition to mobile. It was also a great luck to learn from various user research techniques through this project and this experience will be of a great asset to my future work.

Originally published at annaparkdesign.com.