Understanding & Designing for the Next Billion

The latest round of the UX Talks, Live series hosted by Peepaldesign had Harini Karthik, Sr. Manager Research, Flipkart sharing her journey towards Understanding & Designing for the Next Billion users.

The talk and the discussions that followed were of the highest quality. Here are a few highlights from her talk outlining how research is laying the foundation for better understanding and ultimately leading to the design of more successful products.

The millions of new users joining the Internet is widely recognized as a massive opportunity provided you can figure out how to design products & services that are appropriate for them.

The typical journey of next billion users starts with an app like Shareit before moving on to Whatsapp, Youtube videos, maybe Facebook and online shopping in that order. This is very different from our own journeys which started with search, email, facebook, shopping, Ola/Uber and streaming video (Prime, Hotstar, Netflix)

Understanding the next billion for Flipkart involved a multi-dimensional approach consisting of,

• Understanding first-time visitors through logged behaviour
• Quantitative profiling to understand their demographics, mobile handset owned & its capabilities, data plan etc.
• Qualitative deep dives to understand awareness, accessibility, trust and assistance. For example,

Access: Validate assumptions around the ability of these users to write/type well enough in English/ native language etc.

Trust: What makes these users trust the apps they already use. How to ensure privacy in a situation where the phone is shared across multiple members of the family.

Awareness: Do users understand the jargon that is prevalent in e-commerce? For example cart

Assistance: How not to make them feel stupid!

The approach Flipkart has taken can be summarized by the following guiding principles, Guide, Minimise and Advise

• Designing for Device, network connectivity and memory constraints. Most users have phones that might be, hand me downs/ used. There is a constant fight to stay relevant when Whatsapp is the most important app and everything else is evaluated based on the frequency of use (users tend to uninstall once the order is placed)
• Build on what they know and expect.
• Can e-commerce replace the frictionless experience offered by WhatsApp when it comes to logging in
• These users have learnt a limited vocabulary in English. So it is better to transliterate than translate into pure/formal words in their native language
• Use literal images — Flipkart changed to using a literal picture of product categories instead of abstract icons