My first internship

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.

Resolving a brief

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

Reviewing the current version

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.

Critiquing the existing product

Through this analysis I tried to ask a couple of questions like:

• How is it Tez structured?
• Where was it confusing?
• Where was it elegant?
• What phases of use was I guided through?
• What is significant, different, innovative, or fun about it?

In attempting to answer these questions, I was trying to figure out the design decisions that elicited each of my reactions.

Diving deep into specifics

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.

Conducting precedent studies

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

Brainstorming concepts

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

The final concepts

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.

My valuable learnings!