Designing The Future of Fintech— Being a Razorpay Design Intern
Highlights from my product design internship with the Razorpay design team
In order to escape the chilly weather of Delhi and get back to designing after a hiatus, I was looking for a winter internship but I also wanted to try my hands on something different (other than B2C products). Among the Indian companies building products for other businesses — Razorpay was one of the names I often used to come across. Also, I had heard a lot about its design team on #designtwitter, especially in the Indian design community. So I felt that Razorpay could be a good place to spend some time and learn.
Next, I reached out to the team to check if they could host me.
Luckily, after a couple of calls (telephonic+portfolio review), the team decided to bring me in for 8 weeks.
Hands-on User Research
Thanks to the design leadership, I was lucky to be working on a project with a very broad scope and significant impact — Create a Design Vision for Payment Links. Payment Links is one of the most successful Razorpay products in recent times and we wanted to understand how people were actually using it and make necessary interventions to enhance the entire user experience.
We spent close to 5 weeks doing user research — cold calling merchants, setting up meetings and battling the Bangalore traffic for the user interviews to uncover pain points. This was an entirely new role for me since it was the first time I was doing hands-on research, I had been a part of research activities in my past experiences but here I was responsible for leading the entire activity. Being the socially awkward person I am, it was a bit scary to start this activity but slowly I got a hang of it. Over the course of the next few weeks, We did fourteen merchant interviews–ranging from very small businesses to mid-range enterprises.
Shoutout to the team for the kind of ownership I was given as an intern, this was something Chetty Arun had mentioned during the interview and they surely kept their words.
💡 Top learnings from conducting research 💡
- Face to Face Meetings are more effective than phone calls: We started off the research process by doing customer calls, but they weren’t really helpful. They fail to provide enough value due to two factors. First, audio calls lack context since you are unable to see the screen of the person so you can’t really know for sure what the person is talking about. This makes it difficult to ask follow up questions. Second, they lack depth since the other person might be busy or in the middle of something when you hit them up and may not answer your queries very sincerely. On the other hand, during in-person conversations, people are way more willing to give feedback. This also allows you to study them in their natural environment.
2. Asking the right questions: The make or break point of a user interview is often the kind of questions you ask during the conversation. We were looking to understand the entire user journey of how Payment Links fit the business use case, so we avoided asking feature level questions. Harish helped us prepare a rough guiding questionnaire which we referred to during the interviews.
There were two rules that I religiously followed during the interviews — First, Don’t ask Yes/No questions. If the question can be answered in terms of Yes or No. Don’t ask it. In words of Harish — “It will just be an opinion and not insight.” Second, Be a dumb listener and don’t assume anything. Asking how they perform standard actions can often help you uncover very interesting insights.
3. Logistics of the interview are equally important: Another thing I learned over time was that the logistics of the interview are equally important. Always call the merchant on the day of the interview and confirm the meeting time and location. I used to send an email reminder 24 hours prior to the meeting, and if they didn’t acknowledge — give them a call on the day of the meeting. Also, it’s handy to record the conversation (either audio or video), but make sure you take the consent beforehand. In general, try to keep the conversation very casual (rather than an interrogation )— you need the person at the other end to be very comfortable before they start sharing their troubles with you.
Disruptive Ideation
Another highlight of my internship was coordinating a cross-functional brainstorming session. Once we had insights from the research on how merchants were using the payment links, we decided to use cross-functional power and invited folks from sales, marketing, customer support, product management, and engineering to brainstorm on how we could potentially improve the product.
We decided to borrow the Disruptive Brainstorming technique from Atlassian’s playbook. Atlassian defines it as –“brainstorming technique to disrupt your team’s neuro pathways and generate fresh ideas, this is the play for you.”
Using this technique, within 90 minutes we managed to generate 200+ ideas (~110 unique) around how we can collect one-to-one payments.
Pro tip if you’re organizing a similar session — Get good quality post-its and have some breaks between the brainstorming loops. Also, pizza would be a nice addition.
Designing for Businesses
I realized that when you’re designing for businesses, you need to have a different mindset as compared to designing for consumer products. You need to plan how the design will perform with time and scale. For eg. How efficient is the design flow when you have to generate 1000 payment links in a day? generate 10 links in 15 minutes?
The other part of this is the trend in the market. As a designer, I used to believe that businesses, in general, don’t care about the UI. They can do a compromise if the experience is slightly jarring or if the UI is ugly. What matters to them is their own business. If you can help them make money easily (convert payments quickly, for instance) that is something which is of value to them.
But philosophy at Razorpay is to challenge this notion. How do we know that they are operating at their full potential with barely functional interfaces? The idea is to attack B2B with a B2C mindset. These businesses also use well-designed products like Google Pay, Swiggy, Flipkart, etc in addition to Razorpay products. The design team tries to change the expectations in terms of UX and UI that companies like SAP or Salesforce have created over time.
During my last week, Harshil and SM were kind enough to sit with me to discuss the Razorpay journey and tips on building digital products.
I was also hoping forward to chat with Shashank, but couldn’t due to his busy schedule lately. The fact that he personally reached out to me talks a lot about the culture. It was definitely a very sweet gesture :)
The Design Team
I had heard a lot about Razorpay design before joining the team, and they honestly exceeded my expectations. In my opinion, the Razorpay design team is one of the best design teams in India (easily in MY top three). The speed at which the team produces quality work still amazes me.
Not only they create kickass content, but they also are so tightly knit together like a family and always celebrate all the highs and lows together (and the daily lunches 🍛). I had a ball learning from one of the bests :)
Closing Notes
It was a memorable 8 weeks journey and looking back I have nothing but learnings and happy memories. I will always look back at this experience with a lot of fondness. A big thank you to all the Razorpals who were part of this experience! Onwards and Upwards 🚀
In case you wish to learn more about the work I did, please get in touch with me via Linkedin or Twitter.
Special thanks to Pranjal Shrivastava, Saurabh Soni, Harish Simha and Chetty Arun for helping me navigate the fintech puzzle and making sure I was always moving forward ❤
Liked what you read and want to be a part of the tribe? Razorpay’s hiring Product Designers across levels: https://razorpay.com/jobs/
Until next time 👋
