HKTDC’s Online Marketplace has been up and running since 2008. Having a focus on KPIs set in different eras and driven mainly by small functional enhancements in the past, the internal teams had found it increasingly difficult to run the platform - in terms of keeping the customers satisfied, acquiring new advertisers or chasing the KPI targets. Thus as part of the Digital Transformation HKTDC PEC (Publications & E-Commerce department) went through, a request has been raised about redesigning the old-fashioned interfaces and upgrading the user experience flows for the Online Marketplace.

The Online Marketplace sets out as a typical e-commerce platform where products are the inventory to serve users' queries. In order to make an improvement, we first studied the old search mechanism and identified certain problems - search accuracy, filtering mechanism, information completeness..., etc.
The redesigned search & browse flows see clearly categorized filters on search result pages, prioritized information display according to users' reading needs and more. To facilitate the search accuracy, a cleansing and re-categorization exercise was suggested for the product pool too before launch.

For a platform impressive like the Online Marketplace, we were very careful before suggesting any change ideas to the business unit. Through in-depth interviews, conversations and interactive workshops with HKTDC's targeted group of users, we identified some key difficulties from 'information providers' - the Suppliers.
The platform serves different industries, and suppliers in each industry want to market themselves differently - there's no one template that fits all. We thus designed a generic template that allows flexible editing; while also adding in sections that guide suppliers to input information that interests buyers most.

In this age, data transparency is welcomed, and it's expected somehow. Although HKTDC's targeted pool of suppliers is not the group who we would classified as Innovators, Early Adopters or Early Majority in the technology adoption curve, but still insightful data would be useful to them - they can read, try to analyze, try to understand, and try to improve.
For the suppliers in the ecosystem, we suggested the Business Unit to open up and allow honest data to be reflected onto the carefully designed dashboards. For what data to display, we stepped into suppliers' shoes to understand what they need to know most. For the performance dashboards, we especially went through rounds of psychological measures, in order to come up with a 'showing insightful figures, but not too hard to read' balance.