Intern with Zest
Descriptive process of redesigning the Merchant website of a fintech company
In Winter 2016, I did my first intern as an UI/UX Designer with ZestMoney. The intern came as a surprise to me as I had never expected an internship offer so early in my career. The intern was based in Bangalore. I was really excited for it. It was a short duration intern (of 1 month only). During this intern, I was assigned projects mostly on the website design with “Redesign of the Merchant page” as one of the projects. I worked on other projects too which will be covered entirely in another blog post.
Overview
ZestMoney is a fintech company that enables customers to buy items at affordable prices and pay later with easy EMIs without the use of credit card. ZestMoney partners with e-commerce companies known as Merchants, to enable financing at the checkout, enabling EMI. Zest’s Merchant page is thus an essential page that helps in attracting these merchants. It was thus, going to be an interesting project for me.
The challenge
The existing page was outdated and was not upto the new UI guidelines set by the company. So, my job was to redesign the page to meet the new design guidelines and at the same time, give it a fresh look. Considering that most of the work like font selection, font sizes and colors were already decided in the guidelines, it appears that there was not much to do. Well, it was exactly the opposite. The design guidelines set multiple constraints to the design techniques and the styles that were to be followed. Accepting the challenge, I started with research.
The target audience
ZestMoney is a B2B2C company which means ZestMoney partners with other companies/businesses to provide its service. The service attracts customers to the merchant site where they buy their products. Therefore, the audience which we were targeting primarily were Merchants. Merchant page thus, had to provide enough information about the benefits of partnering with Zest in terms of business related terms like AOV, conversion rates etc.
Research
Since, the vision about the users was clear now. My aim was to see how to attract these users to avail the service. For this, I studied various competitors and other fintech companies. I was working closely with SK Prasad Iyer, Head of Marketing who helped me understand the technical terms in Business. I started listing down various sections possible for the website before going into designing wire-frames.
Sections possible
- Benefits of the business(Stats showing merchant sales, satisfaction meter, change in no. of customers)
- Various Integration options available
- List of all partnered merchants
- Testimonials of some of these merchants
- Features available in zest (e.g. Dashboard etc)
- Testimonials of the existing customers
- Allowing merchants to register for our service(The goal of the website)
Lead capturing
The best way to increase conversions in B2B markets is to make the registration process simple and attractive. Simpler the process, more the people who come and register for the service. This is called Lead capturing. We decided to dedicate a separate section in the webpage for registering and also reduced the no. of form fields that the users needed to complete, thus making the process simpler and that’s how we capture leads in our website. This was the major change in the website.
Wire-frames
Mockups
After the wireframes were approved, I moved on to designing mockup.
After we completed the website design, my task was to make it responsive for other platforms. I started working for designing its mobile version and It came out really well. Have a look.
Prototype
After all the mockups were finished, I used Invision to make a prototype of the website and communicated my entire design to the team and fortunately, it went into production very soon. You can view it live here: http://zestmoney.in/merchant
Summing it up
The whole process took me 15 days from research to prototyping with all the iterations done. Since this was my first intern, I learnt a lot about our team work with people from other disciplines also whose combined effort made it possible to launch a product. I got a hook up of working in an office environment, meeting deadlines and updating the team about daily progress.
The sumptuous lunch and snacks available in the office pantry and unlimited tea, coffee to fuel up my daily routine made it really easy to complete the project before the deadline. After the completion of my intern, my mentor SK Prasad Iyer took me on a delicious lunch treat. At night, the folks at ZestMoney were kind enough to give us a treat at Khao gali.
That was all about this project. If you have any other project, you think, we can work together on, feel free to contact me at yadavnikhil012@gmail.com .
