AliExpress is renowned for its fashion products, but a challenge arises because over 90% of our sellers are based in China, creating apparel primarily for Asian markets. Consequently, many clothing items are designed to fit Asian body sizes, which may not be suitable for customers from North America or Europe.
UX Team
YANG Shuang - UX Designer, Product Designer
Frequent Changes in Business Strategy: In 2017, the AliExpress 11.11 sale started at midnight on November 11th, Pacific Time. In 2018, it was switched to Australian Eastern Daylight Time, and in 2019, reverted to Pacific Time. These frequent changes create confusion, making it essential to clearly communicate the correct start and end times to our users.
Rapid Knowledge Accumulation: Having a diverse team doesn’t automatically ensure we select the best date formats for our users. To accommodate 18 major languages, extensive preparation is required.
Combining Content and Coding Knowledge: Traditionally, we provided written content for the 11.11 sale. This year, we are integrating design components supported by back-end machine-generated data.
To tackle these challenges, I focused on learning extensively, collaborating closely with our content team and those with relevant cultural backgrounds, and maintaining strong relationships with our developers. Most importantly, I aimed to be a helpful and cooperative team member.
The 2019 AliExpress 11.11 Global Shopping Festival starts at midnight on November 11th, Pacific Time. Below are the times for all our major markets, using capital cities as examples. It's crucial to communicate these times accurately to ensure users can take advantage of the best deals of the year on AliExpress.
Highlighted below are key date elements. Elements marked in green are required, while those in yellow are optional for the 11.11 event.
In the US, people generally prefer a 12-hour clock format, whereas a 24-hour clock format is more common in France, Singapore, and Russia.
Timezones can vary in their naming conventions. Some use abbreviations, such as Pacific Standard Time (PST) and Moscow Standard Time (MSK), while others do not, using terms like Paris Time or Madrid Time.
Daylight saving changes significantly affect time calculations. For example, in Los Angeles, daylight saving time was observed from March 10th to November 3rd in 2019, causing a time difference with Beijing to shift from 15 to 16 hours around November 11th.
When indicating time ranges, most countries use an en dash ('-'), while countries like Japan and Korea may use a tilde ('～').
The date format differs: 'month-day-year' is common worldwide, while 'year-month-day' is preferred in China, Japan, and Korea (CJK countries).
Commonly seen Arabic numerals (0-9) differ from Eastern Arabic numerals (٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩) used in the Middle East.
We use four primary countdown elements for the 11.11 event: days, hours, minutes, and seconds. To provide flexibility for our designers, these elements come in three lengths: Full, Short, and Narrow.
Different languages handle singular and plural differently. For example, in English, adding 's' or 'es' denotes plural (1 day, 2 days). In Russian, singular is 'день', two to four days is 'дня', and five or more days is 'дней'.
For specific business scenarios, the countdown can extend beyond 24 hours, like the 48-hour duration of the 11.11 sale. We tested two formats and found that most colleagues preferred the first format, favoring fewer digits for easier comprehension.
Once content and design patterns are finalized, our development team starts building the features.
OpenType layout features support alternate letterforms and rules, such as alternate figures, small caps, ligatures, ordinals, and fractions. These features enhance our final design outputs.
While proportional numbers are typically the default, monospaced numbers may be used for countdown displays to maintain consistent spacing and layout.