The Challenge
Why Mobile?
Sellers, especially owners and managers, are constantly moving (engagements, finances, offline activities) and need 24/7 easy access to their business information without requiring a computer.
Pre-Transformation Challenges
- Limited Functionality: Significant gap between the desktop Seller Portal and the existing app. Not all operational activities were supported.
- Usability Hurdles: Absence of a mobile-friendly user experience and slow response time. Play Store feedback highlighted tech issues, pages not opening, and bugs.
- Data Sync Issues: Not always in sync with data on the website.
- Missing Critical Features: Common asks included Advertising (PLA) metrics, easier seller support contact, and better notifications.
- Technical Debt: The app had stability issues, with feedback noting it was "buggy". Sessions crashing was a problem.
Research and Planning
1
Identify Target Users
Focused on Primary (Owner/Manager) and Secondary (Operations personnel) profiles with distinct needs.
2
Extensive Customer Research
- Analyzed Current Usage Metrics
- Gathered Feedback from existing users, surveys, and the Play Store
- Performed Competitive Analysis of other marketplace apps (Amazon, Snapdeal, Lazada, etc.)
- Held Focus Group Discussions to understand sellers' daily routines, mobile usage, and missing features
3
Define High-Level Requirements
Focused on sellers' Jobs (tasks to get done), Outcomes (how they measure success), and Constraints.
4
Prioritize MVP & Scope
Used research to define the initial scope and prioritize features.
5
Define Success Metrics
Established metrics across Input (active users, engagement), L2 (adoption, activities), and L1 Output (rating, NPS, growth).
Feature suite design
I led the end-to-end design and research for the Flipkart Seller Hub Mobile app. This involved overseeing the product design for key features, ensuring they met seller needs and business goals. I also contributed to broader initiatives like implementing Design System V0, ensuring visual consistency and efficiency.
Business Dashboard
Giving visibility into business performance and growth opportunities.
Listings Management
Simplifying catalog, price, and inventory edits.
Advertising (PLA)
Enabling campaign monitoring, budget actions.
Seller Support
Providing 24×7 access to support tickets & easy tracing
Protection Fund (SPF)
Improving issue management and claim filing.
Buyer Questions
Facilitating direct seller-buyer interaction.
Promotions
Opt-In & Opt-out from time bound Flipkart promotions
BBD '20 on App
Added BBD preparation, live sales dashboard and insights
Business Dashboard
Critical Feature
Description: To provide sellers with an Overall Business View, highlighting key information Flipkart wants to draw attention to, and making key operational callouts concisely and proactively visible.
Why it was needed: Owners/Managers need frictionless visibility (24*7 easy access) of their businesses to take quick actions. The current view in the Seller App failed to provide a complete overview and cover critical metrics. There were no major "red flags" callouts apart from account deactivation. User needs included Business Summary (GMV, trend), Performance Summary (Overall rating, Return %), Inventory status, Listing insights, and Growth insights (Price/Product/Promo suggestions).
Design & Implementation: Information shown should be Critical, have High frequency updates, and provide Insights leading to actions. The dashboard provides views of business health, not just performance.
Impact:
- Provides sellers with critical insights into their sales, service quality, product quality, and performance tier.
- Offers views on pending orders, returns that need action, and payout information.
- Enables exploration of growth opportunities like Promotions and PLA campaigns.
Listings Management
53.34% Adoption
Description: This feature was aimed at making it easy for sellers to manage their online catalog, specifically the critical and frequent actions like editing price and inventory.
Why it was needed: Inventory and order health stats were identified as user needs. Sellers needed to update stock. The existing app allowed stock updates only for non-smart and single-location inventory.
Design & Implementation: We solved for a basic card structure that was scalable and reusable for future releases. User testing for Listings showed good overall experience (9/10) and ease of exploring listings (8/10) and editing price (9/10). Observations highlighted that search was a first priority to find listings, navigating to listing details was successful, and filters were easy to understand. User queries included confusion about shipping/pricing recommendations and listing statuses.
Impact:
- Sellers using listings management on App increased from 58k to 70k (20% increase).
- Feature adoption increased by 14%, and activity level from App doubled from 6% to 12%.
- It helped in reducing effort by 20% for Design and Engineering sprints for features like Price Recommendations.
- Contributed to an 11% impact on Weekly Active Sellers.
- Feature adoption on Mobile reached 53.34%.
Advertising (PLA)
40% Adoption
Description: To increase engagement of Advertising using the App as a key channel, making it easier for sellers to monitor and manage Ad campaigns on the go and get more sellers to use PLA as a growth lever.
Why it was needed: PLA was a top feature request from sellers via feedback channels like interviews, calls, and surveys. Sellers wanted an option to manage ad campaigns, including playing and pausing existing ones.
Design & Implementation: The design process involved requirements gathering, user studies, data hierarchy definition, concept ideation, prototyping, and user testing.
- User Studies: Key learnings included that performance monitoring is key (done 2-3 times a day), sellers prefer numbers over graphs, and common actions include pausing/aborting campaigns and increasing budget. Sellers want to understand where budget is spent and the balance.
- Data Hierarchy: Critical information for campaigns was prioritized, including Campaign Name, Status, Budget, Budget Remaining, and ROI.
- Ideation: Explored different approaches: Data-heavy, Action-heavy, and Balanced. The final design likely incorporated aspects of these.
Impact:
- Higher Budget Load (35%) and higher ad spend (12%) by sellers on App compared to Desktop.
- The rate of growth in Ad Spend is also higher on the App (4% vs -1%).
- Feature adoption reached 40% on Mobile.
- Contributed to a 13% impact on Weekly Active Sellers.
Seller Support
40% Adoption
Aim was to enhance the Support experience on the App, making it easier for sellers to monitor and create support tickets. This also involved migrating from Webview to React Native.
Why it was needed: Thousands of sellers were weekly visiting the support option and creating tickets via the App, even when the option was limited. There was consistent negative feedback through SD support tickets and App reviews for poor seller support experience. Sellers wanted an enhanced experience via the App, completing the use case for a mobile user. Real-time communication through push notifications could drive seller pending actions.
Design & Implementation: Included user studies, defining entities and their importance, evaluating options, design walk-through, scoping, and defining success metrics. The general design process involved requirements gathering, user study, data hierarchy, concept ideation, prototyping, and user testing.
Impact:
- The seller base using the Support Tickets feature increased from 340 to 5610, a 93.93% increase.
- Approximately 32.76% of total tickets were created via the app.
- Initial metrics showed over 1300 unique sellers visiting the support section and over 130 tickets created via the App.
- SSAT improved by 60% for App users post launch of SPF, which is related to Support.
- Feature adoption reached 40% on Mobile.
Protection Fund (SPF)
23% Adoption
SPF allows sellers to claim from Flipkart for returned products that are damaged. The aim for launching this on App was to ease the seller pain in filing these claims. The feature provides complete visibility and issue management capability
Why it was needed: Improving SPF was a scope of improvement for Return Processing. Sellers were already using the feature, but there was scope for improvement. Seller Support features like SPF lacked Guided Assistance initially.
Design & Implementation: Part of the broader Seller Support design process, involving understanding user needs and flows related to filing claims. V0 design focused on creating and monitoring tickets, including SPF related issues.
Impact:
- 30% of the claims were filed from App (Oct’20).
- SSAT improved by 60% for App users post launch.
- Contributed to a 6% impact on Weekly Active Sellers.
- Feature adoption on Mobile reached 23%.
Promotions
26.3k Monthly Adoption
Description: To give sellers the ability to view and manage their promotions from the seller app. The primary focus was on Listing offers (~90% of offers created).
Why it was needed: This was a key ask in various channels, including interviews, calls, feedback via app, and surveys about app usage. There was a significant overlap between sellers who opted into promotions and those who use the seller app, presenting an opportunity. Making it easier for sellers to opt-in could lead to more time spent on the app and higher NPS. Nudges via the app could increase opt-in rates and reduce dependency on account managers.
Design & Implementation: Key decisions included progressive disclosure of primary information upfront and representing "Sale" as a banner. Sellers need to know about new eligible offers and offers they have already opted into.
Impact:
- Contributed to a 6% impact on Weekly Active Sellers.
- Feature adoption on Mobile had significant monthly usage (26,311k) in August.
Buyer Questions
Buyer Connect Feature
Description: Facilitating direct seller-buyer interaction via the app. The feature involved a UI review for the Android app.
Why it was needed: A user query indicated that Q&A is helpful only if they get notified on the app and email so they can reply immediately, highlighting a need for better functionality and notifications.
Design & Implementation: Adding buyer questions to quick links, the layout of the landing page with tabs for unanswered, answered, and bookmarked questions, showing a limited number of questions initially with an expand option, and details on the question details page including linking to listing details and character limits for answers.
Impact:
- Enables sellers to respond to buyer queries directly from the mobile app, potentially improving response times and customer satisfaction.
Big Billion Day (BBD '20)
Yearly Feature
Description: Providing hooks for content related to BBD preparation to generate engagement on the App.
Why it was needed: To leverage major sales events like BBD to drive app usage and establish the app as a communication channel.
Design & Implementation: Kept in an MVP form initially. The event was successful and paved the way to design and develop event-specific experiences. The same UX was planned for BBD 21.
Impact:
- Successfully generated engagement on the App during BBD 2020.
- Paved the way for future event-specific experiences.
Recognition
Excited and honored to be acknowledged for the efforts I have spearheaded thus far!