Lessons Learned By Understanding The Intersections Of Product & UX

Rajeev Nair at UXDX Community: India. Video: https://youtu.be/mmrVv0plsow

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and agenda

[00:00:00] Hello everyone, excited to be here with all of you. After the brief introduction, about myself: I'm Rajeev. I work as a senior director of product at a company called Meesho in India. Meesho is an e-commerce platform, especially geared towards the tier 2, tier 3, tier 4 segment in India. Before working with Meesho, I used to work with a company called Gojek. I spent around five years there and did a bunch of roles, and before that I was in the consulting industry for a long time.

[00:00:39] Today, as already mentioned, I'll be talking about how to build compelling products, and sharing my experience at Meesho and at Gojek as to how, using various insights at the intersection of product and UX, we were able to create products which were compelling, with all the use cases for our users, and help provide them value.

[00:01:08] This is broadly what I'm planning to do in the next 20 to 25 minutes. I'll start with how understanding the very diverse demographics and deep diving into the various nuances helps uncover insights which help us take product decisions. I'm going to share a few nuances, a few examples from my recent experience, and how we have been able to use those insights in product decisions.

[00:01:42] The second thing which I'm going to talk about is, even after you understand your users very deeply, how it is very important that we also understand the various barriers which prevent our users from being successful in using the product, or which create an impediment for them to fulfill their goals using a product. That's what I'll be covering in the part on breaking barriers.

[00:02:14] Then I'll also talk about how, once you've understood your users and their barriers, you can actually create compelling, tailored experiences which ensure that the product that you're building is landing the way it should be, and has a higher chance of success. And finally, what I will also talk about very briefly is that this is a specific process of creating products, but how do you ensure that this way of building products can be sustained in a big organization at scale, so that everyone is actually building products this way. I'll briefly touch upon the various values, organization design and practices which are important to help that happen.

Understanding a diverse set of users

[00:02:58] Having said that, let me start with the first section. A brief background: I work on the seller side of things at Meesho. Seller side means sellers are the ones who have all the products which they are willing to sell to the end customers, and they list these products on the platform. So this is the target group, and typically the target group that we have is what we call the Bharat of India, which is the tier 2, tier 3, tier 4 segment. A lot of them are probably selling online for the first time.

[00:03:37] A lot of them have come online very recently, experiencing the internet very recently. Some of the first products that they have used are things like WhatsApp, a very common first introduction into digital products, and then they graduate into social products, and then video streaming products, et cetera. If you look at their digital world, for a lot of them, that's what the digital world is, and that's how they're being introduced to the digital world.

[00:04:04] Now, when we think about building a seller panel, a seller-side product, for such a diverse audience, there are a lot of aspects that we have to take into consideration, and the team at Meesho, the user researchers, the designers, the product people, actually went about understanding them. What I'm going to share is basically some of the insights that we uncovered, which we use as guiding principles when we go about building products. This could be different for different user groups, but the idea is to present some of these aspects so that you understand what kind of qualitative insights and guiding principles help us in creating products for this set of audiences.

Familiar mental models

[00:04:46] The first thing is familiarity with their existing mental models. We realized very early on that, as I was saying, there is a way that these users experience products, both in the offline and the online world, and this is at times very different from how you and I actually experience products. And then we have to understand what clicks and what doesn't. For example, for our sellers, the UI and UX needs to be extremely intuitive. For example, hiding your navigation under multiple levels becomes very difficult for them. Icons only is not a very good way of communicating with them; you typically look at icons plus text.

[00:05:34] A very interesting example which I would like to share: in our password flow, when you are onboarding, you need to set a password, and the copy used to say something like, "The password needs to have an uppercase letter." And we saw that the drop-off during this was very high. Once we started deep diving, we uncovered that the word "uppercase," for example, is not very intuitive. It's not used as commonly as by you and me. You and I intuitively understand what uppercase means; for them it was alien. And we found that instead of "uppercase," something like "capital," for example, is something that they typically use. We changed the copy with that specific insight, which led to a difference in the way the conversion worked. So these are some of the examples of understanding the ecosystem in which the user operates and utilizing that insight to take our product decisions.

Reducing the cognitive load

[00:06:37] Another one is around what we realized: we need to reduce the cognitive load when it comes to the various decisions that the users have to take in the product. If using your product means that they have to do a lot of decision making by themselves, then the chances of success are very low. Instead, if the product is able to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and the users have the option and the choice to accept and move forward, that leads to better conversion and that leads to a better user experience.

[00:07:13] For example, when it comes to suggesting prices for their catalog, we suggest prices and then the user is able to edit them if they want to. Also, in terms of catalog upload, having less stringent rules. These are some of the things that we need to do to reduce the decision making on the user side so that the adoption is better.

Providing a saathi

[00:07:37] The next thing which we understood, and it also came across from understanding the users deeply, is how they operate when something is very new to them. Typically, let's take an example: say they want to start a bank account. What they will do is look out for someone senior in the community or in the family who has already done that, and they will ask them to accompany them to the bank, help them do all the process, and use them as a help to get through that process. This is typically what we call a saathi.

[00:08:15] What we figured was that when you need to ensure the adoption of your product, you also need to use the same mental model and provide them such an experience. Because, as I said, a lot of them are new to e-commerce. So how do you ensure that when they come into this new world, this new product, they always feel that there is Meesho, there's someone who is helping me out to get through this journey which is very alien to me?

[00:08:48] That's why we have very bite-sized goals for them once they get on, and during the activation process we have these small bite-sized goals which they can do. Then we have small bite-sized videos which are actually done by human beings who relate to these sellers, explaining things. And even when they look at the video and they don't understand it, we have a human touch, and we say, "Okay, we have this webinar which is available to you." So at every step of their journey, we ensure that wherever there is a chance to create anxiety, we are there, with interventions in the form of providing that saathi to them.

Removing the anxiety of the unpredictable

[00:09:30] And the fourth aspect is ensuring that the anxiety which comes due to the unpredictable nature of the digital world is taken care of and removed. Because, as I said, they are new, they have a lot of anxiety, and they don't know, when they make certain interactions on the product, how it is going to change the behavior of the product. If I'm going to click this button, for example, what is the next thing I'm going to see? If I have taken this action, what is the next thing which is going to happen three days later?

[00:10:05] All of these are very important aspects which we need to take into account when we started building products. For example, our CTAs are very, very clear: navigate to a certain place, for example. Or when you have taken an action and landed on a success page, we say, "Okay, great. Now your money will be credited into your bank account in X number of days." So there is no ambiguity in terms of what is going to happen next, and there is a predictable nature to it.

[00:10:38] In summary, these are some of the guiding principles. Again, there are more, but these are some of the guiding principles which we keep in mind when we are taking product decisions, when we are taking design decisions, and these help us a lot.

Breaking accessibility barriers

[00:10:51] The second part is understanding the barriers. Having understood the users and having understood what helps them succeed, you also need to understand the constraints within which they are operating. Because if you don't have that understanding, what will happen is that no matter what product you build based on the insights that you have, if you are not taking care of the barriers and the constraints, then they will not be able to succeed. Hence we also understood and realized that there are a bunch of barriers that the users face when they are using our products.

[00:11:26] A few examples again. One is accessibility barriers. A lot of our suppliers typically do not have a laptop or a desktop. There was an incident: I was doing a supplier call, and I was talking to a supplier who had just onboarded to Meesho three days before. I asked him, "Hey, you registered three days ago. Why haven't you uploaded any products?" And he was like, "Yeah, first, I did not have a laptop, which I had to borrow from my friend, and then I'm waiting for the technician to come and fix the broadband for me, and then I will do the products. I'm going to do it, but these are my constraints."

[00:12:09] Some of the things that you realize here are, one, they don't have the tools which are necessary for them to do business, so they need to depend on someone. Second is they don't know things like, even if I have data on my mobile, I can actually use that; even if I have a laptop without broadband, I can actually use it via a hotspot, et cetera. They don't know all of these kinds of things. That's when we realized that reaching the user where they are is extremely important. For example, that's why for us mobile, and having a great experience on mobile as well, is extremely important, and we take a very platform-agnostic view when we are building products.

Usability barriers and localization

[00:12:51] The second one is usability barriers. Here also, another anecdote. When it comes to sellers on other platforms, let's say, one of the things that we have seen is that these sellers are very accustomed to using Excel, for example. If they want to upload products, they will download an Excel, do a bunch of things, make changes to prices, et cetera, and upload it. What we realized, again, was that our target group is not comfortable with Excel. They have not used Excel. Some of them are retailers who have just run retail shops for the past X number of years and never used anything like Excel.

[00:13:32] When we first introduced our catalog upload as an Excel flow, a lot of the sellers found it difficult to use Excel to do all of that. That's when we realized that we need to actually, again, understand their barrier and build something which they can do. That's when we introduced a flow where no Excel, nothing, is needed. They can actually do one product at a time, which is simple, easy enough to understand, and can be done very easily even via mobile, for example. So this is another example of understanding the usability barrier.

[00:14:03] Another thing is localization of content. Being a diverse audience, we always started with English, but obviously we soon realized that we cannot land all our messaging and our user experience that way, and we have to be localized. So we started understanding how users comprehend written communication, iconography, visual communication, all of that, and slowly we started realizing the barriers that they face when it comes to that. For example, we started off with communication: whatever communication we sent, how can we localize that? And we saw whether there was an uptick when we actually localized content. Using English, for example, is very, very effective with a certain set of audience, rather than going very local to a language like Hindi or Malayalam.

[00:14:53] Another aspect is: do not try to localize commonly used words. For example, things like "order" and "penalty," all of these things are known to them. Don't even try to localize those into the language. All of these nuances when it comes to usability are also something that you need to understand and apply when you are taking product decisions or user experience decisions.

The trust deficit

[00:15:16] And the third one: again, given the audience, given the set of experiences that they have, there is an inherent trust deficit when it comes to using digital products, and especially digital products for their income, which they are dependent on. So it's understanding what the various fears and anxieties are that they have, and ensuring that we take care of those via social proofing, showing that other sellers have been successful and this is what they have done. When they understand that people within the community have been able to be successful, they will also build that trust.

[00:15:59] And taking care of myths that they have. For example, some people think that small sellers cannot be successful, so we ensure that we show we have built the platform in a democratic way, and that you can also be successful. These are some of the things that come up as barriers when we try to interact with our user group, and we need to be very proactive in ensuring that this messaging is done, it's done in the right way, and it is taken care of when it comes to building products. So that is the other aspect: understanding users, understanding their barriers, and understanding how to break those barriers.

Tailored experiences: awareness, consideration, conversion

[00:16:32] Now, once you have understood users and their barriers, and you have built really great products, you also have to ensure that when you are introducing this product or feature or anything to the users, you are introducing it in a tailored way, in a very specific way, in a customized way, so that it lands well. The value that the product or feature delivers, how it is beneficial to them, all of that is landed well and is very clear to the users, and that is when the adoption and the success of the product is taken care of.

[00:17:13] We also do it in a similar way. What we do is use a concept of awareness, consideration and conversion, and I'll explain it with an example. Let's take the example at Meesho of wanting to become a seller. Looking at the target group that we have, it's a fairly complicated process. Because, one, there are anxieties around doing online business. Second is that there are some regulatory needs, for example bank details, having your GST, which is necessary for taxation. And then again it comes back to the trust deficit: "If I have GST, then I'll have tax implications. I've never had GST in my whole life. How is it going to be?" and all of that. So there are a lot of questions in their minds when they want to become a seller.

[00:18:13] When we think about the onboarding experience, we take it in a step-by-step way. It starts right from building awareness about the brand and the product itself and the value proposition itself. When it comes to brand campaigns, the category entry points, the communications that we do, we do it at multiple levels. You first communicate the core value of the product, and then you also communicate the sub-values, things like getting orders, zero penalty. All of these things which create anxiety, you need to ensure that during your brand campaigns, during performance marketing, et cetera, those are continuously communicated and landed in the user's mind. And that creates awareness.

[00:19:01] But once you have created the awareness, let's say 100 people get interested in your product. Once they decide to come onto the product and use it, there too, in our onboarding flow, we know that this is not a converted user. Because if 100 people are aware and 80 come to experience the product, we need to ensure that all of these 80 continue and get onboarded and run with the product. So that's the consideration phase. Because mind you, once you have made them aware and they come onto the platform, they're still in two minds. Some of them are on the fence: is this the right thing to do? Should I do it or not? What is the cost? What are the implications?

[00:19:41] Here also you need to ensure that you proactively understand what their anxieties are and you take care of them. In our onboarding flow, if you look at it, once they are aware and they land on Meesho Supply, supply.meesho.com, it's very clear. There is a hero about what the value proposition is, which is related to their income, which is the most important thing for them. Then you have social proofing, how other sellers have been successful. Then you have FAQs around the anxiety points that they have, and then you have myth busting, like small sellers can also be successful. All of the things we were just talking about in the earlier slides, understanding the users and their barriers, all of that needs to be converted into communication which is easy for the users to understand, and which helps those who are on the fence convert into taking a decision to get onboarded on the platform.

[00:20:36] And once they take the decision to get onboarded on the platform, here also, as I said, the process is not very simple, because you have to provide your details, personal details, bank details, GST. These are not very easy, and we need to understand how to make this process easy for our sellers. If you look at our onboarding flow, again going back to understanding the users and doing the heavy lifting on the product side, we have a very step-by-step flow of small, bite-sized goals.

[00:21:06] Then we know certain points where people are bound to get stuck, or there is a high level of anxiety, things like providing bank details, or where you need to provide the GST details. We know that these are the steps where a lot of help is needed there. Going back to what I was saying, we have a saathi sort of mentality. There's a very clear indication: do you have this? If not, then this is the help that we provide, and you can do this, et cetera. So during the conversion step also, these kinds of things are taken into consideration.

[00:21:40] So this is about understanding the users and their barriers and ensuring that you land your experiences very well. This sort of framework has helped us build multiple features and products and improve our probability of success. Obviously there are areas where you still continue to learn, but I think keeping this framework in mind, and keeping those insights and guidelines in mind, helped us build products at scale.

Sustaining this at scale: values, structure, practices

[00:22:19] Now, when you think about this process of building products, you also need to understand how you convert this process to work at scale. When you are a big company and the product is big, how do you ensure that all the teams, all the product managers, all the user researchers, all the designers, are following a set process and are able to adapt to some of these aspects? For that, some things are very important. One is values: what are the values which everyone inculcates? Second is: do you have the organization structure to help implement some of these practices and be successful? And third, what are some of the practices which enforce adherence to this framework? In the interest of time, I will quickly go through that.

[00:23:10] For example, in my current company, Meesho, when you look at our values, there are a lot of values which resonate with what I was just mentioning. For example, being user first is one of the very, very important values. How do you understand the core of your users? How do you understand the nuances? How do we understand the insights which we were talking about? It's a very important value that everyone is expected to adhere to. Similarly, there are other values like being problem first, and depth and detail orientation. Once your company has some of these values, it's about ensuring these are inculcated in every individual who is working, and are incorporated in the day-to-day decision making.

[00:23:50] Second is having an organization structure which supports this. For example, we have a fully staffed, really good team across all the critical functions, like user research, design, product, engineering, et cetera. We also ensure that in the organization structure we have self-contained pods, which have engineers, designers, et cetera, everyone working towards a single goal, which ensures that there is involvement of user research and product designers upstream in the process, so that all of these kinds of nuances can be taken care of. Product managers, designers and user research collaborate very, very closely to unearth those insights and use them in the decision-making process.

[00:24:37] And finally, some of the practices. Again, different organizations can have different practices, but these are some of the practices which help us inculcate some of these values which I mentioned. One of them is what we call "listen or die." For example, every employee who joins the company is expected to go through this program where they will call tens of customers or suppliers, whoever their main customers are, understand them, create an insight, and then present it back to the team that they're working on. This ensures that that connection is built from day one itself.

[00:25:15] Then we have practices called problem-first sessions and working sessions, where it is ensured that the teams follow this practice of understanding their users, their barriers and things like that. And we also have supporting documents and templates, where even someone who is new to the system, who is not used to the system, is able to quickly adapt to this way of working, which helps us ensure that we build products in a successful way. So these are some of the things that, in my experience, helped us build successful products. And that's it from me. Thanks a lot.