Bridging the Gap Between IT and Business

Challenges

UNIQLO strengths lie in its high fabric quality and functions with already-affordable price as branded clothes. The brand’s wide offline store network across Indonesia is famous for its enjoyable shopping experience. In the market that is brimming with promotions and cashback, UNIQLO e-commerce must able to strengthen product quality and provide similar shopping experience to offline stores.

I joined website operation team which responsible on updating UNIQLO digital platforms (website & app) from the home page, navigation, catalog & category page, and article contents. We work with Merchandising, Inventory, Customer Relationship Management, Customer Center, In-store, and Marketing teams.

With small team and the whole website to work on, we have to be able to quickly update our digital platforms to suit Customer needs, communicate brand’s strengths and strategies, maintain weekly product administration, and avoid errors in short-term. While also must constantly adapt business strategy accordingly in the long term based on current business situation.

Approach

We used PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) approach to measure our website and app performance. With limited resources and high sales target, we focus on two priorities: Achieve profit and customer satisfaction. We constantly monitor which products that’s on trend online and offline, and then try to balance the product arrangements in our website and app to achieve sales.

What I Worked On

My main responsibility is working on catalog pages. These pages communicate product strengths and based on occasion. For example, Travel Essentials page communicate the brand’s HEATTECH product and which products suitable for snow travel. Workwear Essentials offers which UNIQLO shirts recommended for work.

Other than catalog pages, as daily and weekly e-commerce operational, I’ve also worked on product administration and constantly monitor product arrangements on the all category pages based on business situation.

What I Learned

Business is volatile and always changing, especially in fast-fashion industry. I learned to always view my work not only from my technical scope of work, but also from a business perspective. I have to also adapt and improve daily work to speed. With my technical web design PoV, I realized the business strategy and plan by developing the catalog pages and arranging products on category pages.

Challenges

Harian Kompas was in a challenging situation with the increasing trend of social media and digital platforms. These made newspapers demand declining rapidly, and made the company losing revenue from newspaper advertising. While the company have many diverse print-based products, they present new opportunities by converting into digital since digital platforms have more diverse way of presentation: Namely motion (video) and interaction (user input).

Since print contents categorized based on editions, digital platform requires each platform or website focus on what we try to deliver. Based on that, the brand developed many micro-sites to accommodate diverse type of contents.

Approach

We built microsites such as Klasika (daily life article contents), Klasiloka (hangout place or restaurant curation), Travel (travel curation), and advisual.kompas.id (interactive story landing pages). Each month, we reviewed and focus on improving its SEO.

What I worked on

As web designer, I act as intermediary between business and IT department for managing the micro-sites. Towards the end of my tenure, we managed to gain revenue from clients such as Universitas Airlangga, Parkway Cancer Center, Universitas Indonesia to build micro-sites for their branding.

What I learned

My web design skills expanded with SEO and developed the ability to write SEO articles. Experience with Content Management System (WordPress) to quickly deploy micro-sites and tailor the layout to suit the business requirements. My communication also improved by bridging between business strategy and IT department to build and maintain the micro-sites.