How we build Blibli Mitra and reach those who lived in rural area with limited connection.

Introduction
To be honest, I didn’t expect that I’m gonna get this project and will be working from end-to-end on the design with the rest of the team. I’m excited to share my thought and design process behind Blibli Mitra, our new products under Omnichannel tribes that serve small stores and Djarum Retail Partners.
We as a team approach this with very carefully because of the very nature of this product. This is a new market we are targeting and have a completely different persona than the one that we have at Blibli. We gained a lot of insight by working very closely with Research and Business team to find the right solution for these small stores.
How does it start?
If you look at Blibli typical customer today, we are more focused on urban affluent. That happened because our product price and the services that we offer are factored into high quality and those people who actually tune in on this are those people who fit into class A-B. That aid segment and people who had a high disposable income and if you are looking at the entire epidemic, they are basically only a 4% of customers in Indonesia.
Blibli Mitra specifically was designed to not only bridge social economic barrier, but also to cater the rural market. Right now Blibli is only focusing in Jabodetabek, Medan, Solo, Bandung and many other big cities but not so much in Lampung, or Palu. So with Blibli Mitra, we’re not only going to rural area, but we’re also going to hit those tier 3 or tier 2 cities.
But where does that kind of trade start from? It usually starts from small stores like warung or the small coffee shops. They have the trust of the local communities, and trust from the most important currency in commerce. Like, if I trust you, then I’m gonna buy something from you. And vice-versa, if I trust you then I will let you buy something from me without paying and pay later when you have the money. So we wanted to bank on that trust, we want to empower the seller with technology and the things that you wanted to sell. Cause we know, your customer also have other necessities such as pulsa, token listrik, and paket data. So with this initiative, we can help them to increase their sales and also increase their trust with their customers. While also providing stock replenishment with fast shipping, so they can sell more product in lower quantity.
And in the future, we want them to be our brand ambassador in their local communities.
Roles and Responsibilities
As the User Experience designer for this product, my role here was to make sure our Mitra partners understand how this product works, what’s in it for them, and how this product will be able to help them increase their sales while also making sure they have a really good experience when using the products.
While it’s also my responsibility to do some user research to find out what’s their pain point, what’s their need and goals, find out where we can tap in on their goals to fit with our business, I also need to understand product specifications and user psychology, conduct concept and usability testing and gather feedback, create personas with UX research team through user research and data, defining the right interaction model and evaluate its success, developing wire frames and prototypes around customer needs, to find creative ways to solve UX problems (e.g. usability, findability), communicate those design ideas and prototypes to our developers, and keep abreast of competitor products and industry trends.
Basically this is what the whole UX design process look like:

Constraints
At first, Blibli Mitra can be threatening since we are dealing with totally new target market and new kinds of so called partners—Mitra. Some might say it’s easy, but when you do the research, there are lots of constrains that not only come from the Mitra partners but also from the infrastructure. Such as; older phone, limited data, network stability, and unsupported OS.
And also, most of the people who actually open a warung are old, and those people don’t really know how to operate an app.
You might think that these restrictions might limit you from doing what you want, but if you think about it, this actually boost your creativity and it’s essential to achieve the innovation. The restriction is actually making you more critical on what kind of solution that you need to give for those potential customers.
That way the key problem for me, as I realized that no matter how good your product is, everything will lost if it won’t load for all audience. It’s important to have seamless experience on their phone, no matter where they live, no matter what device they’re using or the connection they’re on. As for 2G mobile network cover up to 96% of people globally and are used for basic data connectivity by half of the world’s population. Based on OpenSignal in November 2016, there were only 58.8 percent of internet users in Indonesia who received 4G LTE signal, and received only HSPA+ signal or lower the rest of the time, making Indonesia ranked 51st in the world. The speed of download using 4G LTE in Indonesia was only an average of 8.79Mbit/s or ranked 74th in the world. So there are another 41.2% of people who still live in places where mobile broadband networks (3G and 4G) are not available, making data access difficult. Even for those on 3G or 4G network, the stability of the connection is often the biggest hurdle to deliver a great mobile shopping experience.
And I know that the cost of data is expensive and data usage is really, really important to most people. This is why I wanted to built something that can solve this particular problems, as the goal is to deliver something that is lightweight, fast, and native experience with a core focus on speed and simplicity for people who uses typical Android phones and network connections.
So this project has to have this following goals:
- The app size have to stay below 1 MB.
- Design a seamless user experience so the user can focus on their communication between customer
- Minimize data usage and will work well on unstable or 2G networks.
- Design a web app that works on older devices.
Who work on this?
I wasn’t alone when I work on this, we have a Product Manager, Researcher, Business Analyst, Program Manager, Developers, and Business team. Each of them have their own roles and responsibilities on this project that made this project a reality, this product won’t be possible without all their helps on every aspects.


The outcome
After going through a lot of usability test and redesign we finally decided to go live with our first Blibli Mitra that uses Progressive Web Apps, we launched our app on 2 November 2019 and currently going in the very fast rate on Mitra registration.

This is our first phase of rolling out the feature, and it isn’t done yet. We still got so many things to do on this and our work will never done. We will keep improving the experience and iterating our features based on our Mitra feedback.
And the conclusion, what did I learn?
- In the very first draft of Blibli Mitra, I thought to myself that this product won’t have so much impact on society. I’ve never been so wrong in my life — like I said in the beginning, this product will help lots of Mitra partners improve their sales and help us gain the trust of the new customer for Blibli.
- Tight timeline kills creativity? Not really, it’s actually one way to make you learn how to manage your time and how you make a decision in small amount of time. Because of this projects, now I know how to make a decision based on research and data that we have.
- Doesn’t matter if the UI and the functionality is good, I’m sure there are lots of pain points to user that we haven’t found, yet. And we will figure it out along the way.
Moreover, this project has taught me that designing a product means that the product has to be sustainable, lean and scalable.
If you’re interested in applying for a full-time position or intern, Blibli is currently hiring! Send your resume to recruitment@blibli.com and get the chance to work with other UX Designers & Researchers with their own unique stories.

