5 Things You Should Know About Meesho Design Team

At Meesho Design, we increased our team strength by 5x last year, with dedicated designers working on different aspects of user experience.

The transition and the influx of new people made it vital to define the fundamentals that would bind us as a team, and to establish guidelines and standards that would be followed across.

While we are still learning as a team, we have defined our design processes and structures in a way that we believe will enhance our productivity. In this article, we’ll take a peek into how the design team at Meesho works and collaborates.

In the spirit of keeping this blog just how we like our designs (clear, intuitive, and expressive), let’s jump right in!

1. What’s the Design Process at Meesho?

Our design processes have been set up with the single intention of creating the best possible user experiences. We begin by choosing the most significant user problem that has the highest impact potential and deliberate as a team on how to best solve the issues.

Moreover, all our designs are religiously prototyped to test with users, in order to maximize learning and iteration before implementation so as to increase the odds of success.

We have outlined our product design process in the following visual:

The design team is actively involved in the first two steps, in charge of the next two steps and here’s what happens in each of those stages:

A. Problem Discovery 🕵

The Product, Design and User Research team collaborate to recognize areas of improvement and what problems are most critical to solve, by understanding user requirements and pain-points, with research and analytics.

“If I had 10 hours to cut a tree, I’d spend 8 hours sharpening the axe.”

Projects are then classified to feed into Quarterly OKRs, which are prioritized based on impact, effort, and confidence scoring as well as estimation of engineering effort.

B. Problem Definition 🧐

We try to understand the depth and intensity of the problems along with the main reasons behind it. This is done with the help of targeted user calling, user surveys, gathering user research insights specific to that domain, and analyzing metrics to hypothesize on the problems.

Product managers and designers work together to collate insights, inferences and learnings, to be able to leverage them in the solutioning stages. Once the problem is well understood, we define the scope by optimizing for the fastest way to test the hypothesis and work backwards from that scope.

“Once you spend enough time deliberating on the problem, solutions tend to self-emerge.”

C. Solution Discovery 🔍

Our process begins with understanding the problem, brainstorming different approaches to solving it, searching for outside-in inspiration, analyzing similar and proposed solutions, to finally come up with the best possible solution. User Research insights help us confirm our initial hypothesis and solution ideas.

Typically, this stage includes ideation, competitive benchmarking, user journey touchpoints, workflows, and information architecture.

When there are several high-potential approaches, we use observational testing with low-fidelity wireframes to validate or invalidate the approaches. We synthesize each wireframe with a selected group of users to determine which one is more clear to the target group.

Once the approach is finalized, we also consider the long-term directions in which it can go, and work backwards from there.

D. Solution Definition 👨‍💻

In this phase, we produce detailed, comprehensive designs based on overall user stories, with each story rated according to its relative importance.

• Key Flows Wireframing: It involves low fidelity designs, so that possible changes can be tested quickly. As soon as the approach and solution are aligned internally, we move on to visual design.
• Detailed Designs: These are the high fidelity designs comprising visual communication of the feature and interactions. After this stage, we have a working prototype of the entire feature, which can be tested with users.

Regular internal feedback sessions help us iterate faster ensuring thought diversity through shorter feedback cycles.

• Usability Testing: Before a design solution is selected for development, we rigorously test it with users. We conduct remote usability testing with a prototype and user questions. After compiling all insights, we identify existing problem areas and perform final design iterations before transferring the project to the developer.

Here are some tools used during the entire product design process:

2. Does Meesho have a Design System 🤖 in place?

Yes, we’re in 1-n phase of evolving our Design System.

As Meesho gained more and more features and platforms, a significant design debt accumulated, resulting in a need for consistency inside and out.

We rolled out our Mesh Design System in code as part of our Android app redesign project in October 2020, which allowed us to achieve and maintain design consistency. Additionally, it has improved design-development velocity by streamlining UI and component decision-making and ensuring high reusability.

Since the release of the new app in February 2021, we have witnessed a significant improvement in our conversion numbers. Furthermore, the redesign has increased the comprehension, consistency, and efficiency gains realised by our users.

The team’s productivity increased and the time spent in high fidelity design decreased significantly, allowing us to focus more on analyzing problems and creating strategic solutions.

3. What are the roles and responsibilities of Meesho Designers? 👨‍🎨

The Product Design team consists of generalist Product Designers who are responsible for the user experience of their respective user journeys/verticals. In essence, a product designer provides excellent solutions to user problems that meet business objectives.

In addition, there are Visual Designers who are responsible for design systems and visual communication.

In the near future, we will be adding specialists such as UX Writers, Design System Designers, and Motion Designers to the team.

4. How is the design team structured at Meesho? ⚙️

We function as “full stack pods” and our design org structure exactly mirrors the product org structure to enable our PMs and designers to learn from each other and collaborate deeply to come up with best solutions for our users.

Here is how our design team is structured:

5. How do designers learn and grow at Meesho?

Design for Bharat

Meesho caters to the next billion users in India that create emerging markets in tier 2, tier 3 cities — places where connectivity is improving, people are coming online for the first time, and using mobile phones to get products at their doorstep is a relatively new concept. With user empathy at the heart of our design culture, we heavily invest in research and analysis that enable us with deep-rooted learnings every day to deliver usable, useful and delightful experiences for this niche audience.

Growth path

We recognize the importance of growth and specialization in our team members, so we power them to move forward in one of these two career paths:

• Individual Contributor (IC) path, for people who love their craft and want to grow in their respective domains, like Product Designers, Senior Product Designers, Visual Designers etc.
• Manager path, for those who aspire to create great designers, build amazing teams with them, like Design Managers.

Deliver Business Impact with Design at scale

At Meesho, time and again we’ve witnessed that good design drives efficient business. With the mentorship of top industry experts, powered by problem-first mindset, retrospective learnings, we continually aim to deliver significant business impact with design at a scale of millions of Indians.

End Note ✌🏼

Our growth from a small design team to a midsize one has been both challenging and fulfilling. Also, our DesignOps and practices have evolved really well in the past two years.

To make this a better place for everyone, we strive to grow every day, as designers and as a team. There will be a lot of crappy things that break and we’ll have to constantly (re)invent ourselves, redesign, and design new things, and we couldn’t be more excited.

We’re always looking for talented minds to join us in building stellar experiences for our users. Apply for a role that suits your skills and experience, and build for a billion Indians, one design at a time!