Growing and retaining your digital product’s customer base: What does delightful design look like in Asia?

As global brands aspire to gain customers in fast-growing Southeast Asia, unfamiliarity with regional cultures and preferences means that they could proliferate digital products and experiences with low adoption rates.

Design has become a core part of the solution to this issue, especially in product delivery, with studies showing that companies that embed design holistically into their business consistently outperform competitors in revenue and shareholder returns. In the immense diversity of Southeast Asia, good design strategy – one that delights the customers – can leverage commonalities across markets, to create a baseline experience that still feels grounded in the Asian context.

Foolproof’s Singapore studio opened in 2012 to help our global clients do exactly that. Over the years, using Singapore’s innovation-driven economy and pool of strong design talent as a base, we’ve built up wide-ranging expertise in designing and delivering digital products in APAC for global brands like Shell and HSBC.

Along the way, we’ve conducted user research with hundreds of Asian customers, gathering insight to inform and validate the products we design. Based on our learnings, here are four actionable design principles that could help your digital offering grow and retain customers more smoothly in Asia.

1.Make it speedy

Quick-commerce and superapps are big in Asia. They have gained foothold by feeding customer preference for speed and convenience in their services. This translates into how digital experiences are designed: homepages of typical commerce apps are dizzyingly packed. Information is jammed and tiled, for fast access and rapid exploration.

This may seem like clutter, but dense pages support speed. Research participants over the years have consistently indicated preference for concise and compressed pages, for quick scanning and digestion of information. This need for speed is compounded by mobile gestures - we once witnessed a participant tap across 3 pages in a single second. To feed this need for speed, provide the leanest path to completion and serve early cues to core use cases. 

The best apps use visuals to signpost and manage density. The more literal the imagery, the faster the understanding. The use of literal imagery also helps customers assess products, generating interest and fast-tracking decision-making along the shopping journey. Finally, in linguistically-diverse Asia, visual signposts support customers who are less fluent in English. Otherwise, Singapore’s cosmopolitan ecosystem provides convenient access to a range of Asian cultures for further design research to provide the right visual language.

2. Make it a good deal

In the work we have done around retail experiences, we have observed research participants display heavy product researching behaviour, and a sensitivity to deals. Even global brands, for instance Adobe, are not immune to this quest for discounts. Great brands consistently walk this fine line, communicating value for money tastefully while maintaining the integrity of their brand, edging out competitors in this price sensitive region.

Help your customers make an informed purchase by supporting their product research process: searching, comparing and tracking products and prices. But also offer the delight of getting a great deal. e-Commerce giants such as Lazada and Shopee are the best examples of this, with major shopping days almost every month.

3. Make it human

Across multiple industries, we consistently hear “human touch” being brought up by research participants as a key element in good service experiences - be it in banking, logistics, or healthcare. The Chinese call this 亲切感 (qīn qiè gǎn) - a feeling of closeness that warms the heart. To connect with customers on a more personal level, we see Asian brands opting for bright brand refreshes, with the use of brand mascots. This personification is a great way to express relatable human traits, and decades of influence from “cute culture” have made even adult customers receptive to this.

Take for example Pau-Pau, foodpanda’s adorable brand ambassador. A bubbly and expressive neon-pink panda, Pau-Pau is a sum of foodpanda’s brand: enthusiasm, sustainability and empowerment. Even the unconventional choice of pink for a male panda is a carefully crafted brand expression. Tokopedia’s Toped Universe and Gojek’s Gojektopia go even further, creating rich worlds. On top of expressing brand identity, these mascots also anchor playful in-app micro-interactions, establishing emotional engagement.

Humanising your brand is also great for expressing local culture, creating a sense of inclusion. Many matchmaker platforms have multiple users beyond the end customer, like riders, and they all deserve to be represented. Dunzo’s Duniverse is a great example of representation done right, with stories and personalities that represent their riders and merchants. Each character is inspired by relatable Desi traits: Harri is a huge SRK fan, Bollywood’s biggest star. In their in-app animations, Dunzo characters mimic familiar Desi mannerisms: a nod of the head, a wave of the hand.

4. Make it low-bandwidth

In the research we have done around the region, we often see that expensive data or poor infrastructure means participants still track data usage, switch data off when not using it, or spend large chunks of time in areas with limited connectivity. The best products manage this gracefully, continuing to provide value and usage across a range of conditions.

The first thing to do here is to clearly communicate offline states. Many apps today assume that they will be constantly online, leading to strange application behaviours when the internet cuts out. A simple “You are currently offline” message goes a long way in managing expectations.

Beyond that, provide your customers with control over when to load content. You could even consider providing multiple means to consume that content, beyond immediate loading. Watching a 1GB video may not be the most data-sensitive thing to do, considering how expensive pre-paid data could be is in these regions.

Finally, consider how to provide value even when completely offline: don’t simply leave a warning sign saying “Try again”. Think more along of options that convey  the lines of “Save as draft”. Cache important data locally, to provide offline functionalities or create a “cart” of actions that can be triggered quickly when connectivity is restored.

Summing up

Growing your digital product’s presence in the region is not about evolving your product so that it only works in Asia alone, it is about learning new lessons from this region, and applying them globally.

Indeed, as Asian markets become sought after to enable growth, design can help keep brands relevant across the diversity in the world. Brands like Uber and Walmart are already doing this: Uber’s plans to become the West’s first superapp started 2 years ago, and remains underway.

Singapore is a great place to explore delightful design for the region, with its ecosystem of design and product management talent, focus on innovation, and inherent multiculturalism. Create powerful, human experiences, from Singapore to the world.