A Look Back on Look-back — Chapter 5: The Legacy
By: Thuy Le
Tags: Vinid, UX, Product Development, Product Design, Year In Review

Notes

Most of the UI have been translated into English so that international readers can get the basic ideas of what our feature is trying to convey. The original Vietnamese photos would be added later for comparison. Please excuse us if there is something lost in translation.

While the illustrated UI was originally done in Vietnamese, this article was originally written in English.

Full Case-study

If you are following our case-study series up until now, you are probably aware of the arduous yet rewarding journey we took to deliver a successful feature. In this final article, I want to celebrate the legacy of the first Look-back project with a closer look into its following iterations. As you may have already noticed, the 2 direct descendants of the first Grocery Look-back were:

One Mount Group Employee Look-back, released on 19/9

VinID Year of the Rat Diary, released on 28/01/2021. This campaign ended on March 1, but you can always revisit it in the latter part of this article.

If you are asking yourself what we could have possibly done to innovate our Look-back feature from the first one, please keep on reading.

1MG Employee Look-back

One Mount Group (1MG) celebrated its 1st Anniversary on September 19, 2020. As our domain New Retail successfully developed the successful Grocery Diary feature 3 months before, we thought it would be a fun project to inherit that legacy and created an exclusive version for 1MG employees.

This did not only help us explore new ways to innovate our feature, but also contribute to building a distinctive corporate culture for our organization by enhancing the employee experience. It is also a part of our strategy to establish a strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP) at our workplace.

Data

This time, our feature focused on the employee experience for the group. You’re gonna find here much relatable information that defines the very essence of Vietnamese corporate culture and represents the daily operations of many corporate workers around the world.

Office check-in, check-out (and at most companies, there is gonna be penalties for late-check-in and early check-out)

Slack messages and emails (who can’t relate with this seriously?)

Training, learning, and development time

Unlike our first Look-back implementation, for which the data from VinMart was centralized in one place, we had to work with many different departments, such as IT, Human Resources, and Learning & Development to extract numbers that would cover the most reflective data about an employee’s connection with his or her work and company. Keeping the legacy of our first Look-back, in the end, we customized a special formula to reward a label for each employee based on their data.

After launching, we received stellar feedback about how entertaining these data were to our co-workers. These data did not excite not only our internal employees but also other employees from other companies, especially those working in the tech and product development industry as well.

Content

This time, the content strategy for our Look-back remains the same as the first one’s, but our execution is completely different. We made a parody out of a popular song that most Vietnamese would know: This song is so chill by Den Vau and Min, which you can watch below.

Our parody depicts daily office scenes, special moments, and funny interactions between our employees and company. The most noteworthy thing is that we found ways to integrate the data into our lyrics, which subsequently helped create a smooth lyrical flow that you could sing along with the original. We even made an official audio recording for this, which you can find on Soundcloud.

This content is an invaluable addition to this project’s success. We have gained many praises for our creative tweaks and smart references to a typical office life that everyone (internal employee and external community alike) can relate to. The content is also intended to draw the attention of prospective talents that are looking for new job opportunities.

UX And Technical Improvement

In this project, we introduced a new multiple-photo sharing (multi-share) option for our users. This allows users to pick and share their photos of choice instead of just fixing the sharing function for the screen they were viewing. We had actually thought about this feature since our first Look-back project, but the time constraint didn’t allow us to implement it.

Excuse our lack of translation here, but you get the gist of our interaction, right?

The flow for this multi-share function was simple and intuitive. No matter which screen the users clicked on the Share button, that was selected as default. Then, users could also browse by swiping the rest of the photos, tap to select their favorite photos before deciding to share all of the selected photos.

This improvement strengthens the ease of use for our feature, as well as enhancing the convenience of sharing for our users.

VinID 2020 Year of the Rat Diary

Here it is, the latest iteration of our Look-back series and one that probably reminds you more of the original Grocery Look-back, because it directly connects our users with our services. The notion “same same but different” has a strong presence in this one.

Since the release for this Look-back collided with the time when every Vietnamese was in the mood for our traditional Tet Holiday — our way of celebrating the Lunar New Year, everything needed to convey the traditional festive vibe, and at the same time, solidifies our position as a modern super app in the digital age. Let’s find out how we resolve these two seemingly conflicting aspects!

Illustration

As you can probably notice, the biggest difference from our first Look-back is the illustration style. Instead of our usual clean-shaped, modern, and vividly colored illustrations that are more in tone with our Illustration System for VinID, our illustrations this time pay tribute to Vietnam’s quintessential traditional folk art — the Dong Ho woodcut painting. If you are an international reader, please read more about this art here.

In recent years, there have been multiple movements that blend contemporary and Vietnam’s traditional art. Among them, Dong Ho paintings serve as an endless source of inspiration for artists from different industries, as seen in some examples below.