How I Designed A Marketplace App That Got Acquired By A Billion Dollar Company
In 2015, I was on-boarded as a UX consultant by the Founders of Stepni — an online marketplace that connected vehicle owners with local service centres near them.
One of the reasons why this project got me more excited than usual was because I got a chance to get involved right from the ground up. I got to design not just the mobile and web apps, but also some of the processes and strategies, that would eventually lead to the company’s successful exit as it got acquired by a billion dollar company.
MY ROLE
I designed the information architecture, user flow, wireframes and prototypes to launch V1 of Stepni. I also helped the founders with on-boarding partners for the supply side.
THE APPROACH
I laid down my approach by first bucketing all possible elements and designing the information hierarchy for the project, which would then help me design the user flow and subsequently — a working prototype.
DRAFTING THE INFORMATION HIERARCHY
Sometimes it can get overwhelming to design something from scratch. For most goals in my life, I try and break it down into smaller bits and focus on achieving just one part of it at a time.
I applied this to Stepni as well and started off by listing all the services offered by local garages and categorised different services under different buckets. For example — door scratches, fender scratches, front bumper dents, etc. were bucketed under “Dents & Scratches” and wheel alignment, tyre puncture, wheel balancing were under “Wheel Services”.
DESIGNING FOR STANDARDIZATION
India comes with its own set of nuances when you’re designing a product to be used by the masses. There were a few key considerations I made which shaped the thought process and eventually the final outcome —
- Most vehicle owners are virgins to auto/mechanic lingo. They can easily get confused between wheel rotation and wheel alignment. For me, this meant that I had to design an interface that helped the user make a decision with absolute clarity.
- Most vehicle owners often agree with whatever diagnosis is presented to them, even though sometimes they can be wrong or unnecessary. Over a period of time, this has led to an opaque perception of the way things worked in this industry.
- Each garage would have their own way of assigning costs to different services. This meant that Stepni had to be designed in a way that brought standardization to its very core, and help build transparency and trust.
THE DISCOVERY
As I got deeper into the project, I started conducting interviews with friends, stakeholders and coworkers. This helped me quickly gain insights into the needs of our users and gave me a concrete understanding of the environment. I found that typically, there are three kinds of users -
- “I just want my car to be serviced” — Just about 30% of the respondents fell under this category
- “I have absolutely no idea what’s wrong with my car. Please help!” — roughly 10% of the respondents selected this
- “I somewhat have an idea of what’s wrong with my car and I’d like to get it fixed” — more than 50% of the respondents chose this
It was quite evident who our main users would be.
DESIGNING THE USER FLOW
With these key insights, I started drafting user journeys
We first considered designing a system where the garage/mechanic selection was done by Stepni’s algorithm, in order to eliminate the number of steps required to reach the user goal. But as seamless as it would have been, we had to plan it for a future version due to limited resources.
:(
DESIGNING WITH DATA
Stepni’s vision was to offer high quality services while offering huge savings for vehicle owners. One of the key mechanics of this pricing engine (pun intended) was to figure out what actually went into determining the pricing and how do we standardize or bring the pricing close to standardisation?
We listed all the signals which would contribute to the pricing algorithm and filtered them by assigning different scores to each of them. For example we put a low score to “Age of car”. We used 1.5–2 years as proxy because the first 3 services, which are generally free for a new car, would take that much time.
We also used geographic and location specific data, which was made available by another startup Housing.com. We used this data to determine the cost of operating a garage, which would subsequently feed into the pricing algorithm. For example, if the garage is located in an area where cost of real estate is high, the cost of services would also be higher. Thanks to Housing.com, we had that data.
THE FRAMEWORK
I converted the sketch ideas into a quick prototype and shared it with a few people to see if they were able to make a booking.
In addition to the app interface, I tried putting in a lot of thought in the copy to keep it light. And also to break the barrier of “mechanic lingo”
“My car’s hurt. Can you fix it?”
“My car needs a shower”
“Sit back and have an idli, while we confirm your booking”
Also, I wanted it to be a little bit of fun :)
THE IMPACT
The Stepni app has had a positive impact on the overall maintenance for a vehicle owner. The company started clocking bookings with more than 100% month on month growth. However, a lot that could have been done to deliver a great experience and make it more useful, was put on hold due to resource and financial constraints that comes with being an upstart. It was a decision to either build the perfect app or launch a problem solver. And I’m happy we went with the latter.
In 12 months of launching its operations in Bangalore, Quikr — a billion dollar startup itself, acquired Stepni.
