How 58 Mall’s Design Strategy Overcame Scaling Challenges

Project Background

58 Mall is a new B‑to‑B membership‑package sales system that shifts the traditional offline sales model to an online, customer‑centric service hub. The platform integrates all 58 business lines (recruitment, real estate, used cars, yellow pages, etc.) and includes a points mall, payment system, data backend, contract and invoicing services.

Phase Goals

In the early stage, the mall is in a "wild‑growth" period, requiring rapid feature construction, multi‑business and multi‑platform coverage, and quick user onboarding to gain initial acceptance.

Problems Faced

Designers encountered limited resources, extensive business lines, and overly visual early designs that caused information overload, high design costs, and difficulty maintaining a consistent style.

Design Strategy: Commonality & Individuality

We adopted a "seek commonality, preserve differences" approach to address both shared and unique challenges.

Common Issues

Limited design resources and need for overall consistency.

Multiple business lines and complex functional structures.

Solutions for Common Issues

De‑visualization : Reduce heavy visual elements to create lightweight, clear, and consistent designs, lowering design costs.

Card‑based Design : Use familiar card layouts to integrate and present information clearly and efficiently.

Component Library : Build a standardized component library to ensure rapid production, consistency, and alignment with development teams.

Templated Product Images : Standardize product detail pages with templates to boost design efficiency.

Preserving Individuality

To meet specific business line needs, we applied two methods:

Low‑Cost Personalization : Differentiate business lines with distinct color schemes for membership cards, enhancing brand recognition.

High‑Compatibility Modularity : Modularize complex product packages, allowing flexible addition or removal of modules based on business requirements, improving extensibility and clarity.

Demand Management

Using a four‑quadrant framework, we classified projects by platform vs. business line and by common vs. individual needs, enabling targeted design strategies such as rapid standard‑based output for platform‑individual cases or bespoke design for business‑individual scenarios.

Summary

From late 2018 to 2019, the 58 Mall design team, initially three designers, scaled down to 1.5 full‑time equivalents yet delivered multi‑business, dual‑platform integration and core capabilities within nine months. The design strategy—combining de‑visualization, card design, component libraries, templated pages, and modular personalization—successfully met early goals and set the foundation for future high‑growth and fine‑tuned design phases.