Designing Better Floor Maps for Shopee Building
Written by Bohao, Visual Designer
Why are some people better at reading maps than others? Reading a map requires ‘spatial abilities’, a skill we use to manipulate 3D shapes and geometric information.
There are many types of spatial abilities, each for a different task. But to read a map successfully, you need more than one. Unfortunately, not everyone has this ability. So how do we serve those without?
Observing the pain points of daily office navigation.
2pm in Shopee Building used to be one of the most chaotic time of day. Many employees would scatter around the floor map panel for a long time, trying to figure out which direction to go to arrive at their respective meeting rooms. Some even wandered around the lobby, heading in every possible direction, only to end up back at the map time and again.
I observed the daily dilemma that had been overlooked and put on my designer thinking cap. I needed the three prerequisites to determine if a project is meaningful before diving headfirst into it: necessity, frequency, and market.
- Necessity. The pain point was evident for this project as observed above; thus, it was necessary.
- Frequency. The usage frequency was high. Meetings are conducted every day, throughout the day. When booking a meeting room via Google Calendar, employees can’t preview the location from the system but only navigate from the offline map provided at various points in the office.
- Market. The 244,000 sqft Shopee building can host up to 3,000 people. It was easy to foretell this project’s demand and scalability when expanding the new map to other offices.
Interviewing key opinion users.
Poppy, a Search & Recommendation PM, became my first user. The image above is her typical calendar for a week.
With a poor sense of direction, Poppy often found herself running around the entire level several times to locate the correct meeting room. Sometimes, she even had to ask a colleague to pick her up from a well-known spot, such as the tea point or toilet. She wasn’t an extreme case. Her situation happened to everyone in Shopee, due to the enormous number of meeting rooms we have.
As a designer in Shopee, I had comparatively fewer meetings than Poppy. I needed to step into her shoes to design a better map.
Tackling the essential pain points.
Among many other pain points, viewer direction and map orientation were the first I looked into. There were two things I needed to change to help users better position themselves:
- Viewer direction: The “You are here” red pin with a bright blue beam helps viewers indicate the direction they are facing.
- Map orientation: The map’s orientation needs to align with the viewer, so I rotated the map 90º counterclockwise.
Reaching out to the community.
There were several debates about whether we should add the meeting room legend at the bottom of the map. Stakeholders from the HR team were firmly for it. They felt it was necessary for Levels 2 and 4 that housed many meeting rooms. On the contrary, simplicity and straightforwardness were my priority.
Eventually, we decided to ask the community for their inputs. They were, after all, our end users. So we published the two versions in our internal forum: A (with legend) and B (without legend).
Soon after the post was up, we received more than a hundred comments, many of whom were surprised and relieved that their pain points were acknowledged and addressed. Some justified their choices by explaining why they preferred one option over the other, while others suggested having a voting feature in the forum.
The post gave users a platform to voice their most authentic feedback. At the same time, it helped us gain some valuable insights into user behaviours when reading maps. After two days of receiving overwhelming responses, we went with the winning vote, Option A.
Improve and reiterate.
When the physical map was finally displayed at the internal staircase, I observed many colleagues still having difficulty finding the right meeting room. I later discovered that this was due to the language barrier. How could we help our diverse colleagues whose first language weren’t English to quickly locate their meeting room?
We decided to number them. For instance, if you were going to participate in a meeting in Manila, you could find its number SG5F-25 on the Google Calendar. We numbered rooms based on people’s reading habit, so users can make a quick guess on the meeting room’s approximate location:
What to Expect in the Coming Months?
The article in the forum spread like wildfire. A front-end developer later contacted me due to his immense curiosity about this project. He expressed his enthusiasm and presented a brilliant idea to digitise the map and migrate it online. At that point, I was all ears.
We doubled down on our research and found that most people would feel anxious about getting chased out of a meeting room and having to quickly find a new one to continue their discussion.
So we narrowed the online map down to only three specific but straightforward features: availability, search and QR code.
- Availability. In the map, green represents available rooms, while red means they are taken. The bottom tab shows the meeting room’s availability for the day.
- Search. The search bar helps colleagues find the meeting room’s location, making it easy for them to navigate themselves.
- QR Code. Every floor has about 5 maps, and each map has a unique QR code that reveals the users’ location.
In my opinion, design is like connecting the scattered dots with a thread and gradually weaving more threads to form a net. It’s simple but significant.
These added features are basically missed opportunities to better our daily routine. I’m glad we are addressing it now.
Bottom Line
This project served as an important reminder for designers to put aside our preconceived assumptions about users and value every stakeholders’ opinions, regardless of background and experiences.
It taught me that less is not always more, contrary to what is commonly preached in the design community. The original rationale for this adage was that we do not want to waste our users’ time or lose their attention. But when you don’t fully explain yourself and leave too much to guesswork, you waste even more time and cause frustration.
I can’t thank my colleagues from the HR and IT teams enough. Their sense of professionalism and team spirit inspired everyone working on the project to make an impact and better the lives of Shopee employees. I look forward to extending this initiative to other offices, including local offices in other countries.
Shopee is the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. Shopee connects shoppers, brands and sellers across Asia and other fast-growing markets, empowering anyone to buy and sell anywhere and at any time.
Shopee offers an easy, secure, and engaging experience that is enjoyed by millions of people daily. It offers a wide product assortment, supported by integrated payments and logistics, as well as popular entertainment features tailored for each market. Shopee is also a key contributor to the region’s digital economy with a firm commitment to helping brands and entrepreneurs succeed in e-commerce.
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