Landing my first Product Design Internship at Oro
It’s a dream come true to take your theoretical design thinking skills and practically apply them in a real-life application that’s used by 5k+ people.
Co-author: Shashank Agarwal
A little history
We had this awesome opportunity to participate in Embark — a program by upraised.co, which provides internship opportunities to students by selecting 300 students among 400,000+ participants for internships in Design, Product, Business Ops, People Ops, and Analytics. Embark also holds various sessions to learn from experts and fun events to grow our network with like-minded people.
After a series of test rounds, we made it to the top 50 in design and into the team, visible to the companies for internships. And that’s how Oro found our profiles. We had a smooth interview call where we were introduced to Oro’s mission, life at Oro, and work culture and then we shared our design process, previous projects, and thoughts on design thinking and design system. We were then officially on the team. But before that,
Who’s Oro?
Oro is a fintech startup based in Chennai, India that provides door-step gold loan services across 4 cities and locker services. Trusted by Federal Bank, Fincare, Sunita Finlease, and The New India Assurance, Oro has over 5000+ loans disbursed and counting. Oro aims to build an inclusive financial system that’s transparent and embodies trust.
Our Initial Experience
The first week, we had some KTs on the different services provided by Oro, how the team operates, our day-to-day responsibilities, and weekly review sessions. We were so excited to take it forward. It’s a whole new experience from reading an article like one to experiencing it personally.
The next month, we were on to our UX research process. We had our survey responses, feedback, and opinions from the team, gathered together and we were sorting it and analyzing the pain points of our customers and our sales agents. We started by creating a user persona, and customer journey mapping. We then took it to our design lead and asked for a meeting with the developers and sales team. In this collaborative meeting, we shared our insights on the user’s journey and the emotional touchpoints users might feel in completing the task. We detailed our research, and pain points and got loads of additional details that were very helpful in the future.
Having all the user research data, our next task was to add some additional features we thought the existing application missed out on. We both came up with our unique ideas, and that’s also the point where we understood designs from Dribbble just don’t work in real life. UI may grab attention, but it’s the UX that ultimately determines task completion
The Uphill thereafter
We presented the prototypes to our team, and the feedback was positive. We were given the green light to move forward with revamping the entire user flow screens based on sections. The next couple of months were full of continuous iterations from feedback on top of feedback. The best thing about the team is the feedback — constructive feedback. Every time we try adding a feature to the flow and presenting it to the team, we get the facepalm moment when we get to know the team has already experimented with it and why it doesn’t work. And that’s where our understanding of the people and their interaction with the application grew bigger. And believe us, these facepalm moments start to disappear slowly once you get to know your audience and start designing solutions for them. Soon your decisions are appreciated and that appreciation motivated us to deliver the best experience for people.
3 months later, the customer application is done successfully and now we get on the next adventure of revamping the agent application. This is the other side of the application which our sales agent interacts with while going through the gold loan process. Now our audience gets completely different. Users are now no more non-tech savvy people but rather people who have good technical skills. But since they are part of the team, we got the opportunity to interact with them and understand their pain points. Though the process was similar to that of the customer app, the interaction, copywriting, and research were all completely different.
Finally looking back on where we started, we added features that made the loan process steps more transparent. we removed some clutters in between and added features that made the flow more efficient hence saving time for customers and our agents. We made graphical representations for better visual understanding. Finally, we documented our entire flow during developer hand-off for a better understanding of how the app behaves and interaction works.
Crafting our Design System
Once we are done with revamping customer and agent applications, we thought, “The next time we try to add a feature or additional functionality, things shouldn’t break and get harder”. And that leads us to work on the Design System. We called it Project Aurum. Loads of tutorials, articles, documents, and references importantly, we started off with crafting our design system that makes the future team work seamlessly on the designs. Lots of errors at first, but we quickly grabbed how implementing a design system works in Figma, started creating components and variants, experimented with it, and finally documented them.
We hit Publish.
