Ideas Reimagined

My Role

I was involved from the revamp project’s start until the launch and was the UX owner.
The entire project was conceptualised, implemented, and launched within 4 months. This project was unique as all of Flipkart started working remotely due to the COVID-19 situation halfway through this project. This change didn’t impact the speed of execution and team’s collaboration. The whole team came together beautifully and successfully delivered the new experience launch in May 2020.  
I was involved in the initial workshops with PM, creating concepts, sketches, and wireframes, throughout design iterations. This was followed by sharing design deliverables and supporting the engineering team through the implementation phase. I conducted the build reviews and participated in bug bashes before the final design sign-off.

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About Flipkart Ideas

The secret ingredient to a great shopping experience is the inspiration (other than the right budget and availability of products). 

Ideas is a unique initiative that bridges e-commerce and influencer-led marketing together, enhances the shopping experience for its users, and drives regular engagement for the Flipkart eco-system. 

The primary audience is the users in their non-active shopping phase, looking for inspiration, or those in the post-purchase stage of the shopping journey. Users can discover new products and style inspiration through content posted by brands, trusted publishers, experts, and influencers. Users can add the tagged products within the post to their shopping cart. Flipkart can leverage the broad seller base and fulfillment capacity to provide an end-to-end experience.

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Top brands and Influencers can actively engage with Flipkart customers on Ideas via short, snack-able, and rich visual content that is easy to consume and is tailored to the user’s interests. Flipkart Ideas’ feed supports multiple rich and engaging content formats - Videos, Images, GIFs, Stories, Polls & Quizzes. 

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Learnings from Ideas V1.0‍

Ideas V1.0 was launched in August 2019. ‍

Platform learnings:‍

Growth experiments followed the launch to improve the funnel and customer calls to understand what’s going well, areas of improvement, and closely tracking the metric trends.

• Higher Bounce rates when the users were asked to choose min. 5 interests in User onboarding
• Description text was ignored and skipped by the users.
• Stories as post format within feed was confusing.‍

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‍Content creation learnings:‍

The initial plan was to have primarily Category B influencers and media agencies creating content for Ideas. Towards the Ideas V1.0 launch, we had a majority of Category C influencers who were mainly rehashing the content they had on their other social media accounts and posting on Ideas due to changes in content strategies.

After the V1.0 launch, I was part of the content creator study, along with a User researcher and a PM. We carried out in-depth user interviews with 7 Micro-influencers to understand their content creation process, motivation, and pain-points. 

Industry developments:

The industry trends are changing at a rapid pace to adapt to the user’s demand and liking. Significant developments have happened in-between the Ideas V1.0 launch and now.

• Fashion-focused key opinion bloggers on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms are fast becoming critical influencers. They can inspire consumer clothing purchases by linking high fashion visual evolution with daily street style.
• Trust in Influencers - People are increasingly starting to trust micro-influencers’ words to whom they feel a stronger connection with instead of blatant advertising. Influencers with less than 35,000 followers get the highest engagement rate at 5.3%
• The increasing popularity of snack-able short-form video apps in the Indian market following the Tik-Tok trend - Spoyl, Bulbul, Roposo, Google’s Tangi
  TikTok was the most downloaded non-game app worldwide for January 2020, with more than 104.7 million installs. And of the total downloads during this period, India’s share was a whopping 34.4%.

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How Might We

The learnings from various fronts lead to significant content and business strategy changes. The change in strategy demanded a user experience refresh to tackle the identified challenges.

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Revamp Benefits

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Design Goals

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User Journey

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Optimising the Navigation

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Challenges:

• The feed was a long series of content/posts, which refreshed every new session. We could not read the engagement signals from the user’s browsing session and present more relevant content in real-time since the system had already loaded the upcoming posts and their sequence.
• There was no alternate for discovering new content on specific topics or interests.
• There was a rising need for listing influencers and brands separately due to the difference in the type & intent of contents they posted and the business strategy changes.
• There was no way to set or manage interests or content preferences.
• The content team wanted to experiment with the curated content, e.g., Trending, Editor’s pic, Topical collections.

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The New Experience

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1. User Onboarding

All new users saw a quick walkthrough video as their 1st post. I collaborated with the Content team to create the walkthrough video script to help new users understand the browsing patterns and convey the Ideas platform’s value proposition. 

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I proposed the Swipe Up Nudge as a more organic way of building habit instead of using modals or coach marks that users usually ignore and ignore. The nudge comes up to encourage users to keep browsing content. We also experimented with the right timing to show the nudge to improve the scroll depth.

2. Post Anatomy

I redesigned the feed experience to optimise for short-form video content, so the new experience presented a single post at a time in full-screen mode (optimising for the 9:16 aspect ratio screen size). The recommended content length was 30-sec with a max 60-sec limit.

Post Interactions:

I kept the interactions similar to other popular short-form video apps to leverage the common usage patterns.

3. Aiding Discovery

The new experience accounted for two browsing styles.

• Lazy browsing ➞ For you Tab
• Intent specific browsing ➞ Discover Tab

With the For you Tab, the users could keep scrolling to find interesting content. I designed in-feed reco modules to be used in-between content. These recommendations were based on each user’s preferences and interests that we gathered from implicit and explicit engagement signals.

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The Discover Tab presented various open paths to dive into for the users. Such as browse new posts by Fav creators, Category, specific Interest, Creator’s only content, or Brands’s only content.

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The Ideas platform was still in its early days. We were yet to expand our content diversity and had a limited set of creators. For this reason, the Product team didn’t want to introduce a Global Search. However, I got the team’s alignment to have a local search at All brand and All Creator pages to ease find-ability.

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4. Commerce Integration

The users can view linked products or collections within a content. I designed a quick look through which the users could glance at the product and add it to the cart easily.

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In addition to this, all the products and collections linked to content by creators appear on their page. So it’s easy for the users to quickly browse to their favourite creator or brand’s various looks, find inspiration and shop.

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5. Defining Content Guidelines for Creators

I helped the content team work out the content guidelines for the creators that would work best for the designed experience. This included the tone of voice, best practices to follow, and safe areas for various aspect ratios.

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Prototype

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‍Outcome

The design phase that is from conceptualisation until sharing final design deliverables spanned 8 weeks. The new experience was launched in May 2020.

Learning

• Stronger visual design skills
  Ideas is a unique construct within an e-commerce app. It was necessary to add delight moments in the user journey to make it engaging and exciting. Working on this project allowed me to improve my visual design skills and build my motion design skills while working on micro-interactions.
  I also explored a few gamification constructs to be built for future versions.
  
  
• Growth experiments to fine-tune the experience
  Just after the launch in May 2020, we ran multiple A/B tests for smaller elements like the Reaction Panel, Default Tab, etc., which helped us train the muscle and know what worked in the end.
  
  
• Aligning all stakeholders to the new vision
  ‍It was great to collaborate with all the stakeholders and get their buy-ins to what Ideas should be. Be it making major changes to the way content is consumed in a full-screen mode vs. the existing feed view or convincing the leadership to a dark-themed Ideas that would help content stand out much more.