So I will keep it as short as I can, starting with a short (trust me-short) intro:
I am Mudita, currently in my 4th year of bachelor’s of product design from NIFT. I chose product because I wanted to make toys or guns or something in that line honestly, but the lockdown(2nd year of college) completely changed the game, where I did not have any industrial labs but THE INTERNET!!! (Can’t thank it enough)
I just explored and explored and learned and explored about everything but UX and psychology.
*fast-forward to 3rd year*
I started applying to startups as I wanted to get involved with innovative teams and design for the real users out there, got into one in my academic semester and continued with the challenge after that I had to buckle up for the summer internship, that is when I landed in the Unthinkable solutions a daughter company of The Daffodil Software.
I entered the office (toooo pretty) on the 6th of June 2022 and took 2 days to understand the current application-Fimbre and was assigned a task but the next day, one meeting everything flipped!
What happened?
So Fimbre was earlier working on an affiliate marketing business model but now it is focusing on community building and experience, in short a Revamp happened in those 8 weeks.
It definitely did not happen overnight, or in that one meeting but slowly while the hints were given to the product team by Mr. Yogesh Agwarwal.
We were to design an experience for the communities along with the new design system, it seemed a lot at first but it eventually happened.
How did we start?
It is very very very important to ask questions, as many questions as we can before we start, by this time the user segmentation was done and the teams were divided, but Shristi (Associate UX designer) and I were to take care of all the three communities, too much fun!
So obviously, the users first we had taken feedbacks and synthesised the insights from the user research defined the the opportunities that exist, we could not make to the opportinites just by the user research so market research was a must.
Insights:
- A huge need for sorting the groups into communities to maintain a better sense of belongingness and engagement, and let the users with the same interests align with each other, further breaking the limitations i. e. just from product recommendations to more categories.
- Apparently, the onboarding was very lengthy and time-consuming, it was more of taking from the users than giving.
On top of that mandating certain aspects made the experience go downhill - With time the incentives deviated the desired user journey from ‘making better buying decisions through decisions’ to just using for earning, it became a cause for the suffering of users’ identity and this needed to be brought back but this time with a whole different concept
- Letting the users ask questions apparently was not as engaging, and there was a definite need for open space for the users with similar interests, to have discussions about the topics that align with their thought for a better experience and hence a better engagement.
There was a very clear understanding of the pain points in the top tasks flows and what was needed for a community, I simoultaniously defined the user personas and mapped the journey for a clear understanding of the oppurtinites of for each persona.
Post research & mapping
We definitely had to ask ourselves how might we start to design for these three communities as the demographics is so vast and the language should be consistent, we studied the existing products revolving around the problem and Jackob’s law for the win!
We understood if the 80/100 users are using those platforms the way they are using, what they are using the most and what is not being used and why. A lot of whats and whys right?
Majorly the insights came from data, reviews and the user flow of the previous version
Unique ideas are good but practical ones are better
So with this motto our ideation did’nt take much long but sorting the ieas in what is a must and what can be done in further versions was very important so that we don’t deviate and move on to wireframes and the visual design.
User acquisition through facebook ads
From endless meetings to sleepless nights, the learnings were crazy. Collaborating with the team and handing off the design
I grew a lot as a human and a design intern/student/learner (I won’t say designer yet). At every step I understood better how to design for use cases and how important it is to widen the head and think in all the possible directions, I learned structured handoffs and and structuring the files.
It was a great ride, thank you for reading it!
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