I was ecstatic after receiving the internship offer from Google Singapore. In the hope of discovering a new land, a new culture and a new company, I set out to Singapore in September. In the beginning of the internship, I was a little intimidated(+ I was the only intern!!!) but slowly and steadily I got the hang of it and started to understand why and what the Tez team had been working on, all this while.
At the start I spoke to team members from eng, PM & design to gather an overview and the larger perspective of why Google was launching Tez in India. After understanding and synthesising the inputs I moved on to narrow my scope of intervention to bringing delight into the current customer paying experience in Tez.
Source: Tez
This gave me an opportunity to provide feedback from a new user’s angle and also understand it better. Why certain decisions are taken and the constraints associated with the current implementation.
Through this analysis I tried to ask a couple of questions like:
In attempting to answer these questions, I was trying to figure out the design decisions that elicited each of my reactions.
After the critique, I had a better idea of how to think about my area of intervention in the current architecture of the product. I started thinking about wrappers as a form of sending payments in "delightful packets". Packets that would make the payment experience more personal and emotionally expressive.
India was already a crowded market for payment apps. I narrowed my study to apps that were incorporating payments and a conversational UI to help manage them. Some motives of the study were to find out what strategies they were using to retain and engage their users.
These apps provide a payment service within a chat interface and also use the following features for retention and increasing engagement with their users:
Stickers
Media share (Photo / Video / Sound)
Reactions to messages
Coupons
Gifts
I continued my ideation process and put them across what I called The spectrum of interactions. This included concepts that required no to multiple interactions from the user
I took forward three ideas for interactive wrappers that users could send as their payments. A thank you card, an interactive envelope and a birthday cake that had candles the user would have to literally blow out ;) after receiving it!
Sender flow for an interactive envelope.
Receiver flow for an interactive envelope.
Sender flow for an interactive birthday cake.
Receiver flow for an interactive birthday cake.