Introducing New Social Shopping,
Boosting Engagement for 10M Users

🎯 Business Goals

• Boost engagement by integrating the built-in payment service.
• Drive adoption of the new live shopping experience.
• Create a seamless checkout flow.

👫 Our Users

Target users

LINE has 97 million active users. That’s about 78% of the population in Japan. Our focus is on:

• 20-30s Women: strong digital engagement and high spending motivation in fashion and lifestyle.
• 50s Women: strong purchasing power with established consumption habits.

From a global perspective, live commerce users are on average in their mid-30s, with users in their late 20s being the most engaged.

2 Core user roles

• Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs): influencers who promote products through livestreaming.
• Viewers: shoppers who join livestreams to watch, engage, and consider purchases.

🤝 Key Stakeholders

The project was a collaboration between two companies:

• Client team: In-house team including creative director, designers, engineers, and marketers.
• Agency team: where I worked as a Product Designer alongside other designers and engineers.

🔥 Challenge

Designing a new live shopping experience that fits seamlessly into the existing platform ecosystem, encouraging users unfamiliar with live commerce to confidently engage, purchase, and adopt the built-in payment service.

Research

Researched the platform’s services (Messenger, Pay, Shopping, News, etc.), design principles, and Design System to understand their UI/UX conventions and how they are connected to ensure consistency. To build empathy and support design decisions with stakeholders, I documented and shared the findings.

As this service is new to the Japanese market, I conducted competitive benchmarking research, comparing leading apps around the world.

🔍 Discoveries

As I dug into global examples, a few patterns stood out that guided our design thinking:

• Convention pattern: Real-time interaction such as live chats, reactions, and gifting turn viewing into a two-way conversation and sustain attention. This was seen across all major competitors.
• Urgency boosts conversion: Platforms like Taobao and ShopShops thrive on countdowns and limited-time offers that nudge people to act fast.
• Effortless checkout: Payment flows across competitors were familiar and consistent.
• Balancing clarity and energy: While Chinese apps pack the screen with dense information, U.S. apps keep things minimal. For Japan, we needed to strike the right balance—interactive and bold enough to be exciting, but still clean and easy to follow.

🚀 Process

The project followed a sprint cycle. We held daily meetings with designers and weekly meetings with other stakeholders. With internal designers and engineers, we maintained constant communication and remote collaboration through chats and calls.

1. Design

• Developed multiple design patterns based on research findings (e.g., up to 20 CTA variations).
• Recommended prioritised options, supported by research-backed rationale.

2. Share

• Presented daily to designers in concise 30-minute sessions.
• Clearly explained rationale to enable quick, effective feedback.

3. Refine

• Iterated on design patterns based on feedback.
• Created visual proposals to support verbal communication in Agile sessions.

4. Finalise with stakeholders

• Facilitated sign-off from Product Owners and Managers.
• Handed over finalised designs to engineers for implementation.

🧩 Design System

I built a reusable component library for the service that emphasised clarity, accessibility, and scalability while staying consistent with the design tokens and components across the ecosystem.

Design Solutions

Below are four core solutions that shaped the final experience:

1. Inclusive live chat and purchase notification

Key Insight: Real-time interaction and visible reactions sustain viewer attention.
Solution: Integrated a live chat experience and purchase notifications that increase social proof and encourage impulse purchases.

2. Transparent stock status & limited availability

Key Insight: Scarcity creates urgency, motivating quicker purchase decisions.
Solution: Visualised product availability with a clear stock indicator, boosting engagement and conversion.

3. Simple checkout: Only 2 taps to buy

Key Insight: Any friction during checkout decreases conversion—especially during livestreams.
Solution: Streamlined the purchasing process to just two taps, highlighting key actions with a visible primary button.

4. UI Alignment with the ecosystem

Key Insight: Maintaining familiarity is key to user confidence and adoption in a new experience.
Solution: Designed an interface aligned with the ecosystem, interactive and bold enough to be exciting, yet clean and trustworthy as expected by Japanese users.