FireDrops by Flipkart

Project Overview

Back in May 2022, Nothing launched the phone(1) and it partnered with Flipkart as its exclusive retailer in India. Nothing was planning on airdropping its Black Dot NFTs to its early believers who pre-booked the phone. It worked out internationally as the sale happened via their website and users could connect their wallets to receive the NFTs, however, with pre-sale being done on Flipkart in India, the mechanics of airdropping these NFTs were a question. That’s when Flipkart Labs (Flipkart’s web3 wing) decided to build a custodial wallet that sits inside the Flipkart app. The plan was to reap the web3 and metaverse growth and diversify FireDrops’ offerings.

I worked on designing, prototyping, and the launch of FireDrops, India’s Metaverse shopping destination.

Flipkart unveils lab to tap Web3, metaverse for e-commerce innovations

Wireframing

User flow of FireDrops

The Problems

1. Visual Differentiation: Whether or not to follow Flipkart’s DLS was a conundrum, web3 was the cool new thing in town, and we wanted users to feel the modernity of it while using the product. At the same time, we didn’t want to do away with the trust and familiarity they had in Flipkart.
2. KYC: It was mandated for custodial wallets to have a customer KYC in place. Asking users for their personal information like Aadhaar, and selfie would be high churn processes.
3. Jargon: KYC, NFT, Wallet, Blockchain, and Custody could be very intimidating terms for someone new to the web3 space. We were firm that FireDrops would be the way to onboard the next 100M users onto web3 from India. That would mean that this would be the first platform that millions of people unfamiliar with the space would interact with on-chain — we have to make it as user-friendly as possible!

Our Solutions

Visual Differentiation:

We were sure of two things:

1. The FireDrops experience had to be modernistic and on par with the design paradigms of other web3 products in the market.
2. Despite that, should continue to carry the trust and familiarity associated with Flipkart.

We tried out a bunch of things in the process:

KYC

We had to make sure that the KYC process was simplified as much as possible. This was the first thing users would experience in the app, so we added some storytelling and introduced an identity slate, a socially sharable NFT. Users would get the identity slate upon completion of onboarding and we framed it as if those details were required for minting the identity slate to fruition. This step took a lot of iterations in terms of design and copy to get the right result.

Jargon

We completely simplified the messaging in terms of visuals and copy. Every time a web3-specific term like mint or NFT was used, we explained what it meant.

Usability Testing

Internally, we brought down the options from the above 3 to 2 (Gamified UI & Stylized UI)

We conducted usability testing for a set of 20 users to understand if they could relate to the product offerings. We screen recorded the meetings that focused on the usability of the product, that is, how easy it is to use the product. We also measured user satisfaction with the product with both UIs and analyzed user feedback to identify areas of improvement.

Gamified UI

Stylized UI

Contextual Interviews

Since web3 was a new concept, it was vital to make sure users understand what activity they are doing. For beta testing, we also prepared a list of 12 general questions, followed by interviews via Google Meet that provided valuable insights to learn about participants’ experiences.

Findings

1. Users need more information about what is an NFT, how to mint one, what is a custodial wallet, etc. It was important to include gamified placards to make it more informative.
2. Since we were building this for millions of users from all tiers of demographics, we were leaning toward Stylized UI which was simple and straightforward. Also, the Gamified UI is development-heavy.
3. We took signoff from the stakeholders for building the Stylized UI. We designed the flow and prototyped it for testing the usability of the entire experience.

Constraints and New Learnings

Flipkart is India’s biggest e-commerce application, there are tons of constraints from the development, branding design, and legal teams which I learned during the process and interacting with respective stakeholders.

Listing a few:

1. Flipkart is an e-commerce application, videos don’t work, and gifs are under 2MB and cannot be development heavy. Practically making it almost impossible for having a good 3d experience.
2. Users are not allowed to leave the application, as that is considered a massive dropoff by the Flipkart team. Due to this, we cannot push users to have web experiences like Ozworld by Adidas.
3. Both Amazon and Flipkart website pages are not coded, they are cut into slices in fixed and specified dimensions and put together, so they cannot be development heavy.

FireDrops x Nothing

The UI was designed for the FireDrops platform inside Flipkart App, where users can buy, sell, and trade their Black Dot NFTs. The interface was designed to be intuitive and easy to use and allows users to quickly view and manage their NFTs.

Flipkart ventures into NFTs with Nothing's airdrop

Project Overview

Flipkart had its Big Billion Day Sale in September 2022, and the FireDrops team got back together to build a unique experience for the same. FireDrops collaborated with eDAO for this and served as a platform where users could play games and win bounties which they could claim for freebies and discounts during the sale.

We introduced a bunch of new terminology, users would play Quests — which were held daily during BBD, and win Culture Sparks. Gathering enough Culture Sparks would enable you to get your Strand which you can use to mint your Digital Avatar. These Culture Sparks would also fetch you discounts and rewards during the BBD sale. Problems like KYC flow were solved in v1, in v2, our primary challenge was to make all of these processes simple & accessible.

Wireframing

User flow of FireDrops

Flipkart x eDAO

At the end of the 10-day journey, the fans also had exclusive access to ‘The Strand’, eDAO’s all-access passport to a global culture ecosystem spanning art, sport, gaming, entertainment, and more, airdropped to their wallets. 488K unique users played, shopped, and earned rewards by participating in quests, and raffles and many of them created their first custodial wallets.

This Diwali, Flipkart to woo customers with a Metaverse shopping experience

Check out https://firedrops.flipkart.com/ for more information.

Find me at https://www.thenova.in/