Good design is good business
The past two months have been amazing. I started working with ZestMoney as a product design intern and since then time has passed away like a gust of wind. I learnt a lot about importance of design in driving good businesses and satisfying customers’ need.
Overview
ZestMoney, an instant EMI platform which enables people like you and me with no credit card history to shop as much as we want on EMI. At first, I thought it’s just like some other bank who asks for your various documents and then take weeks to process it before finally giving you a loan. But No, it was fast, you just need to fill in your basic details and the loan is live within a few hours. Presently, it serves about 500+ requests a day and have 40+ partners.
Why redesign?
It all started with a simple vision of enabling people to buy the products they need on EMI in 2015. With India being such a diverse country, creating one app which works for all the sections of society was an uphill task.The first version of the app was a very basic one which worked seamlessly for initial users but as the traffic increased, new bugs started to surface and a need to rethink was felt.
Our primary objective was to provide a seamless experience to users while keeping the business goals in back of the mind, since lending is a risky business.
Considering our growth and limited resources at hand, it was impractical to dedicate entire development team’s time and effort, so we decided to go for SWAT (rapid action team) with an objective to test multiple items at once and fix the required changes in a faster manner while keeping the rest of the team in developing the product.
What we redesigned and how
1. Profile completion
a. Header and progress indicator
Creating a new header with progress indicator was a good experience since there were a lot of steps which needed to be chunked into smaller segments. Progress indicator should indicate how many steps are left and how many have been accomplished.
Previous version of header felt visually heavy and grabbed unnecessary attention with too much irrelevant information. A cleaner, minimal version was chosen. After multiple iterations we settled on a 4 step version. Progress indicators are an effective tool for user interface where we want to achieve some goals. It’s because, as people, we are driven to:
- Have goals; and then
- Accomplish goals
You can read more about it here , here and some inspiration here
b. Better Call to actions
A good call to action gets users to follow through with primary objectives. CTA should be clear since they act as gateway for the steps ahead. Post re-design the conversion at this stage showed huge improvement.
2. Term selection
Here, user selects an EMI plan according to his need. Thus it was kept as simple as possible to avoid any friction for user to make decision. Cognitive load was minimised to maximise usability.
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful” — John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life.
3. Downpayment
We needed to develop a feeling of trust in our user while they are making a payment so trust logos were incorporated and 100% refund assurance was ensured. The order cart was improved visually so that user clearly sees the breakdown and amount to be paid.
With new UI in place, downpayment rates reported an average growth of 2x.
Further scope
Possibilities are endless, testing out multiple flows, rearranging some steps in the old flow, A/B testing with the communications and CTAs, enabling virtual card, Progressive web App etc can be worked out. Some things are already under pipeline.
Key takeaways
One thing which I gained from my internship is that as a designer you should not limit yourself to delivering polished UI, prototyping & testing etc. To become a pro you would have to keep learning new things.
Writing content is also a part of design, since how easily you communicate with user shows your clarity in understanding their needs.
As a designer your focus shouldn’t be just making every pixel look good but also understanding the business need. Understanding business would help you carry more weight in your design decision. Truly, isn’t it the way how good design works?
I’m glad you made it till here. If you enjoyed reading it please help this post reach its audience and don’t forget to hit ❤️ button below
We at ZestMoney are trying to make life more affordable. If 8,16,24 mean something to you and you have an eye for good business then drop a mail at careers@zestmoney.in
A big thanks to Lizzie Chapman and viraj for providing me such a great opportunity. It was great working with Venkat, Saurabh, Shine, AshishK, SK Prasad, Sagar and Murtuza Merchant.
