For the project I was teamed with 3 engineers, Basant Kumar Bhalla, Satyansh Singh and Paras Lohani, all freshly graduated out of college. As a team we also had Charlie Campanella as our lead and Tanvi Jadhav as Co-Lead.
Indeed Chat facilitates real-time conversations between jobseekers who are interested in the same position or company.As a community, Jobseekers use their combined knowledge to answer outstanding questions.
BiE (Beauty in Everything) is a “Portal of Metamorphosis”
A journey of one’s personal transformation that brings out the best version of oneself at every stage in your life.
BIE power routines to deliver results through a combination of doctor expertise, high performance products, beauty and lifestyle coaches and content, and technology enabled routines. Become the personal beauty transformation enabler
Tap the pragmatic action orientation around beauty and the drive for perfection at every life stage , so that you bloom in all the beauty moments of your life
Why did we come to BIE ?
Our consumer research suggests
A strong awakening to a new world of beauty perceptions , expressions and possibilities
Highly knowledgeable consumers updated constantly by social media & influencers
An increased appetite for new beauty solutions , reaching out to experts that promise to fulfil one’s vision of oneself
From romantic, passive ‘beauty hope’ to pragmatic, active ‘beauty work’
Beauty journey as investment in aspirations, life goals
Men moving from hygiene ‘well kept’ to expressing individuality through styling
White shirt is a century old staple, one of the most essential and reliable piece in the closet
Kingdom of Whites would have all-white collection of shirts meant for a plethora of occasions, professions and cultures. White shirt embodies the idea of versatility, giving a potpourri of different looks and styles. An amalgamation of modern dapper looks and timelessness, white shirts are essential and Kingdom of Whites would be one stop solution for that.
Gone are the days when power just resided with the ones who inherited kingdoms and riches. Today, self-made ‘kings’ exist.
They are the ones who have strived hard to be where they are today. Their personalities are a statement of achievement, elegance and authority.
And they are an embodiment of pure power, declaring to the world that ‘We have arrived’
Epitomising the idea of power, the design language of ‘quotes’ has been used in the manifestation of the design.
Big Bazaar is an Indian retail chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores. The retail chain was founded by Kishore Biyani under his parent organisation Future Group, which is known for having a significant prominence in Indian retail and fashion sectors. Big Bazaar is also the parent chain of Food Bazaar, Fashion at Big Bazaar(abbreviated as fbb) and Ezone where at locations it houses all under one roof, while it is sister chain of retail outlets like Brand Factory, Home Town, Central, Ezone, etc.
Founded in 2001, Big Bazaar is one of the oldest and largest hypermarket chains of India, housing about 250+ stores in over 120 cities and towns across the country.
Digital Big bazaar
During the first lockdown due to Covid-19 in India, Big bazaar launched digital services with basic MVPs.
In 2021 however they decided to improvise their digital presence by enhancing the user
experience at different levels.
Being an Agile team, I got an opportunity to work on payment workflow enhancement.
Future Group India is a leading Indian conglomerate with a huge grasp over the retail market in India. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the retail industry has been harshly influenced. To keep up with changing times, Future group is planning to launch several new brands with an emphasis on "digital first". the brands are varying from fashion to food to beauty to serve ware etc.
The project was done to understand the e-commerce ecosystem and create Information architecture, user flows and wireframes for consumer applications of upcoming brands.
The changes in the external environment surrounding the retail industry greatly altered conventional wisdom and just might create a new structure and circumstances (a “new normal”), which will have a wide range of impacts on politics, economy, and our lifestyles, including the digital technologies that support them.
Staying at home and not going out to the store made online purchasing spread widely among those who had not used it before. And due to the change in workstyles resulting from people being forced to work remotely from home, life via online channels has become normal. The digital technology that supports the online lifestyle has been popular for some time, but its spread has accelerated explosively since the onset of the pandemic.
Daan is a digital platform to optimize the flow of resources from donors to the victims.It aims to not only enabling the users to donate money, but other resources like clothes and books as well.The user can also volunteer using the same platform.
Poverty is a state or condition in which a person or community lacks the financial resources and essentials for a minimum standard of living. Poverty means that the income level from employment is so low that basic human needs can’t be met.
The top 10% of the Indian population holds 77% of the total national wealth. 73% of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1%, while 67 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1% increase in their wealth.
The first of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for an end to poverty by 2030 and seeks to ensure social protection for the poor and supporting people affected by climate-related extreme events
The series of projects were done as a part of academic curriculum during my exchange semester at Holon Institute of Technology, Israel. The aim of the course was to understand advanced concepts and technology to create high quality experience using Virtual reality as a medium. Several important topics were covered, starting from 360 Illustrations, adding motion and sound to make it more immersive, exploring 3D in after effects to create flat animations that can be viewed in Virtual reality followed by creating 3D environment using Cinema 4D and transforming the same to create an immersive virtual reality experience.
The age of VR is rapidly approaching.
The market has provided us a new paradigm of immersive 3D content.
Sound, touch, depth, and emotions will be integral part to the VR experience.
Question is
"What kind of experience one wants to design?"
We are used to design for rectangle, with and within rectangle as every viewing device is a rectangle. But, when one is in immersive 360 space, their environment is boundless.
Territories to explore.
There are many possibilities, one can create first person interactive game, an educational VR app, an interactive movie and many more things.
One thing to keep is mind, whatever one designs, one needs to understand the purpose. Whom are we designing for? how are the user persons going to interact and what are their requirements.
In immersive experiences, one can't expect people to know what to do and where to go. Slow and progressive familiarization, visual clues and guidance from software should all be used to help the user.
Please visit the following link to view in-depth research and system design for ecommerce
Kingdom of white is a Men’s fashion brand. The brand has a huge collection for men, from casual to formal, from ethnic to safari, from cuban cut to cabana stripe. The brand offers white shirts in all major categories.
Kingdom of white is focused on a digital first approach to launch combined with the retail channel as the restrictions due to Covid 19 pandemic are eased.
Scope of work includes designing end to end user experience for the digital platforms.
Need to design responsive website for both desktop and mobile
Understanding the product stories and using them as a key element for navigation systems across websites.
There are many websites over the web - creative, noncreative, purely functional, artistic, wacky, innovative...
Sky's the limit, while designing a website. However pretty the website may look, only a few of them are able to nail the function. Be it the position of buttons and CTAs or navigation across pages, it takes research, planning and user testing to ensure a smooth user experience. With the advent of multiple tools and templates at our disposal, websites can be easily customised and maintained.
This part of the research focused on understanding the types of websites designed by other creative and non-creative organisations. I looked at the layouts, distribution of elements, colour palettes, navigation and content. There were some websites that were studied in depth and helped guide the design for Kingdom of white’s website.
The logo for Kingdom if white is designed by DY works, a Mumbai based advertising design agency
Starting with the information architecture
The website to follow the structure from the system study mentioned Here
Mobile-first ensures that one delivers the right User Experience (UX) to the right screen. With such limited space available on a mobile phone screen designing for that makes far more sense for the UX. Designers must prioritise the elements of the website that are most important to create a strong base to work from.
Responsive web design is a design method that allows a website to fit the screens of different devices automatically. It suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behaviour based on the device they are using. Responsive web design is a well-established method used by most web designers, and it ultimately creates a better user experience by reducing users’ operations such as panning, scrolling and zooming.
Progressive enhancement refers to the design method starting with a strong base of designing for the lower browser (e.g. on mobile devices) and building up to a larger design for desktop. By using the mobile-first design strategy the design of a website starts with only the most important elements providing a strong base to build on. It is far easier in web design to upsize functionality and software than it is to try and downsize what is there already.
The website is going to be custom made using Shopify, so all the backend features are well integrated and are shopify default.
Frontend design needs to be provided to vendors for development of consumer facing applications.
Keeping in mind all the essential features required for the brand the first iteration of wireframe was done for three main pages, Homepage, PLP(Product listing page)
And PDP(Product description page). Based on the aesthetics of these pages, all the other pages will be designed.
Global nav
Having the hamburger menu and search button as essentials and having a dark overlay behind. The concern was that the overlay might be overpowering but it actually did not, rather, it added value to the brands Idea
Bottom bar
Same as top nav, bottom bar has a dark overlay on which we have 4 icons indicating home, Wishlist, cart and profile
Product unit
It was decided to not go with a grid format for products like most of the e-commerce sites, the brand wants to emphasise on each product so we decided to go for full width images and elaborated description of each product
Cart unit
There are many actions that a customer might do on the cart page and the aim was to give them all the control on the cart page itself
Wishlist unit
Similar to cart, Wishlist provides several action items that a customer can choose from
While working on the project I learnt to understand the brand in and out to be able to do justice it and give the customer, optimal experience. It was an iterative process and took many changes at each and every level to achieve the final outcome, if you are interested to dive deeper into the project, contact me and we can discuss this on detail.
Thank you
Please visit the following link to view in-depth research and system design for ecommerce
Payment is one of the final steps of the checkout process and most of the consumers drop from the payment page due to various reasons,
Few of them being-
- Unexpected expenses, such as shipping fees .
- The checkout system is complicated
- Out of fear of shady practices. (Trust issues related to credit cards)
- Because they are not sure your store is reliable.
Issues in existing design
Payment offers just listed, no way to apply the offers, which may create confusion in the minds of users.
Saved cards as a separate section then payment options.
Literal depiction of cards with vibrant colors for saved cards as well as Credit/Debit cards.
Too much of color in the icons.
Price Breakdown is not visible to customer at first glance
Pay button active even if no payment method is selected or verified
Updated payment landing
Clear indication of price Breakup details
Introduction of bank offers, a new section to include several bank offers
Resolving UI related issues with payment options (Minimal approach)
Option to save cards and also remove them if one wishes to remove the card.
Pay using saved cards
Just enter the CVV of the respective card followed by OTP received on the registered mobile number to complete checkout.
Bank offers
Showcasing several offers by different banks with an option to apply them.
Once applied, showing only relevant payment methods to proceed with
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Big Bazaar Profit club
BBPC is the credits that a user earns as a reward on every purchase they make.
The user can use the credits equivalent to rupees to pay and place the order.
If the balance is low, he can add the credits and do a partial payment using any other payment method.
Big Bazaar Profit club
(excess balance)
Pay using UPI
Just enter the UPI ID
Verify the UPI and continue paying in the respective UPI application
Pay using Future pay
Future pay is wallet that can be used across any platform in future group brands
Recharge Future pay
Further addition*
Pay using Gift vouchers
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The drastic changes in the external environment caused by COVID-19 have had various effects on the business of the retail industry. The crisis has created stark contrasts in business performance between types of business operations. Due to the government's request for essential business continuity, retail businesses that handle food and daily necessities such as supermarkets, drugs stores, and convenience stores (excluding stores located in office districts) have remained in good condition as consumers wait in long lines at cash registers to buy products, many of which have even sold out. On the other hand, retailers of shopping goods and luxury items deemed nonessential, such as apparel and home appliances, have stagnated.
In retail businesses handling food and daily necessities, some examples of quick action taken include the application of floor stickers to indicate appropriate social distancing positions for customers waiting in check-out lines. Vinyl curtains were also installed at cashier check-out counters, in part to protect employees. In addition, actions such as disinfection of shopping carts and individual packaging of products to prevent droplet infection have been added to everyday routines in response to customer demand for safety, which have added to employee fatigue.
Company headquarters, meanwhile, were forced to act urgently to achieve business continuity while responding to the sudden shift to remote workstyles. They had to implement changes such as granting authority to their employees to allow them to use company PCs at home, and to arrange for paper documents to be taken off company premises. Another example is the rotation systems they created for employees. In addition, because they were unable to receive stable supplies of products from business partners, stores had to come up with new operations to deal with stock out issues, such as limiting purchases to one per customer for certain products.
The retail Industry has struggled to survive since the onset of the Lockdown. The changes in the external environment surrounding the retail industry greatly altered conventional wisdom and just might create a new structure and circumstances (a “new normal”), which will have a wide range of impacts on politics, economy, and our lifestyles, including the digital technologies that support them.
Those who fail to Adapt to the new normal have to struggle to gain footfalls again.
New users are turning to ecommerce with long lasting implications
Proportion of purchase made online by infrequent ecommerce users
Data source- Accenture consumer research paper
With changing times, everything is available at one's fingertips. One can order anything, from grocery to clothes to medicine online. To handle these demands there are many systems at play, forming the ecosystem of e-commerce. The system that sells a wide variety of products, provides smooth checkout options, and doesn’t crash during huge sales and events.
There are some functional requirements that need to be met, like
System architecture : An overview
A homepage which will have some recommendations, personalized or general depending on if it is a returning user or a new user. A search page where users can see results based on some search text.
A company operating at scale would have multiple suppliers. To manage these suppliers we will need multiple services that we are collectively calling Inbound Services.
KAFKA is a framework implementation of a software bus using stream-processing. It is an open-source software platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds.
As soon as a new item is on-boarded, a search consumer will make sure that this item can be queried by the users. It will read and process all the new items being on-boarded and format it such that they can be stored into the database and the search system can understand it.
Now a Search Service interacting with this Elasticsearch will expose APIs to filter, sort, search, etc. the products. If you remember, in the functional requirements we mentioned ‘search with delivery ETA’. This can be extended to the requirement that we should not show the search results that cannot be delivered to the user as that would be a poor user experience. For this, the search service will talk to something called Serviceability and TAT service. Serviceability and TAT service will check which warehouse the product will be delivered from, if there is a route between the warehouse and the user’s pin code, if yes then can that route be used to carry this product.
From the search screen, the user should be able to Wishlist a product or add it to the cart. This happens via Wishlist Service and Cart Service . Wishlist service is a repo of all wish lists in our system and cart service is a repo of all carts.
Each time a search happens, an event is fed to KAFKA. This helps us build a recommendation system personalized to the user’s interests and also a general recommendation based on the most popular products. Similarly, Wishlist and cart services will also send similar events to Kafka.
The next component is the User Service. It is a repo of all users and also provides APIs to fetch, update, add, and delete users from our system. It sits on a MySQL database and maintains a Redis cache.
Serviceability + TAT service, which identifies whether or not we deliver to a location, and calculates the ETA. It does so with the help of Logistic Service and Warehouse Service. Serviceability service can access warehouse service to get a repo of all products stored in a warehouse, or it can talk to logistic service to find out all the courier partners, or to fetch a list of pin codes that we can service, etc. Based on all this information, serviceability and TAT service will come up with the shortest route between the warehouse housing the product and the user and will also compute the ETA for delivery.
When a user wants to place an order, the request will go to an Order taking service, which is a part of the larger order management system. The order management system sits on a MySQL(structured query language) database.
As soon as the order taking service is called, a record will be created in a Redis with an order id, date, and time at which the order was created and an expiry time for the order id. Along with these details, there will also be a status against that order id, let’s say initially this status will be “created”. Now the next step will be to call the inventory service. For instance, there were 5 sets of Sony 65” Smart TV in stock before the order was created. After placing the order the inventory count for the product will be reduced to 4, only after this the user will be redirected to payments. But why do we update the inventory BEFORE the payment is completed? What if instead of 5 TVs, we only had one in stock and 3 people trying to buy it? If we reduce the inventory count before going to the payment flow, 2 out of the 3 buyers will see that the item is already out of stock, and their flow will end before even going to the payments page. This can be implemented easily enough by keeping a constraint on the inventory count such that if the count goes negative you shouldn’t be able to place the order. Now, once the inventory is successfully updated, the order taking service will talk to the payments service, which will talk to the payment gateway and carry out the whole payment flow. When an order reaches a terminal state like delivered or canceled, we will move it out to a Cassandra and this will be implemented with the help of order processing service and historical order service.
Now that the users can successfully place their orders in our system, they might want to see their past orders as well. This is where the Orders View comes in. There will be an intermediate service that will talk to the order processing service and historical service to fetch all ongoing as well as completed orders and communicate to the orders view.
Also, whenever an order is placed or the status changes to “in transit” or “delivered”, either the seller or the customer needs to be notified. This happens through the notification service.
Consumer application consists of many processes, from navigation to the product, adding to cart or Wishlist, checkout and payment workflows.
Overview : Consumer app for ecommerce
Sign-in / Sign-up flow
This intense project made me familiar with the whole ecosystem of e-commerce, While designing a website, I know what element need to go in which way for user to have an optimal experience.
It also gives me a framework for many processes that are common over all e-commerce websites.
To leverage the gap, to deal with inequality in our society the efforts and policies by government are not effective due to corruption and bureaucracy at each level. An alternative to deal with the problem is NGOs, but these organizations are facing issues with fund raising and basic awareness.
Criteria 1 : On the basis of social and psychological reasoning
In my research I have looked into why people donate, why they don’t do it as much as they would hope to and how to bridge this gap.
Purely altruistic I donate because I value the social good done by the charity.
“Impurely” altruistic I donate because I extract value from knowing I contribute to the social good for the charity.
Not-at-all altruistic I donate because I want to show off to potential mates how rich I am.
But are these motives strong enough to enable people to donate as much as they would want to? Most people support charities in one way or another, but often we struggle to make donations as often as we think we should. Although many people would like to leave a gift to charity in their will, they forget about it when the time comes.
Criteria 2 : On the basis of how much they can give
Hearts over heads
People are much more responsive to charitable pleas that feature a single, identifiable beneficiary, than they are to statistical information about the scale of the problem being faced.
Influenced by others
Giving is fundamentally a social act. when donors see that the donor before them has made a large donation, they make a larger donation themselves.
Giving is contagious
Charitable giving is contagious – seeing others give makes an individual more likely to give and gentle encouragement from a prominent person in your life can make also make a big difference to your donation decisions
Magical thinking
When faced with the opportunity to give money to a charity, people often inflate their sense of how likely it is that they will get a disease and that spurs them to donate
Tax deduction
Empathy
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After considering several options the name DAAN was chosen.
Three main attributes of platform are:
Trust, Help, Uplift
Primary brand colors
Logo explorations
Logo form iterations
Logo type exploration
Finalized logo
Illustration style
Physiological comfort
Designing an experience that is comfortable for people is the most important consideration and apparently a difficult one too.
Motion sickness while using VR is very common.
To avoid motion sickness, one needs to understand the fixed reference point, such as horizon line and the grid.
Canvas size.
VR works on equirectangular projections. In a 3D environment, these projections are wrapped around a sphere to mimic the real world.
The canvas size is in a ratio of 2:1
Context
Tel-Aviv is a beautiful city with a very rich art culture. One can often find a lot of people sitting, chilling and embracing the beauty of the city.
One of the major cultural hub is situated in the city center, Habima square.
In the month of March 2020 when Covid-19 Pandemic has started to spread across the globe, people are forced to be under lockdown.
Everyone, who cherish the free spirit of the city and the art culture of Tel-Aviv are bound by limitations to not leave their home.
Opportunity
For all the people who are under lockdown, who cherish and miss their spot at Habima, I decided to give them a virtual experience of their favorite place
Starting with some image references and initial sketch
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Adding colors to create interest and add depth
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Click to experience in 360 VRSound
While sound is often annoying when using the or mobile app, it is an integral part of VR development.
And else can add that twist better then Nina Simone's "Feeling good"
Context
While designing for virtual reality, we have the capabilities to go beyond the box and create an experience that is very difficult to go through in real life. I have always been fascinated by the underwater world.
As a child, I used to spend hours in front of T.V just looking at those wonderful underwater creatures. There are many people who share my interest, but do not have capability to experience that in real life.
Opportunity
To create an underwater environment with the creatures which fascinates me a lot personally "JELLYFISH". This was an opportunity to create something for all the enthusiasts out there, who wish to experience the underwater world with some cute jellyfishes :)
The modelling and animation was done in Cinema 4D, with the help of tutorial by Daniel Danielson.
The virtual experience
While the modelling and animation was done in Cinema 4D, the further enhancement of the environment was done in Adobe after effect.
Context
With technology, one can break out of the box and explore the territories that have never been explored before.
People love to get surprises, to get amused, to see something different. Specially during the time of global pandemic, when the exposure to digital content has increased exponentially.
Opportunity
To provide people with an immersive experience which helps them to relax, to meditate and transform beyond reality.
For this, I decided to create a mystical land, taking forward the previously designed jellyfish and adding some other mystical element to add character to the environment
Sound
sound played a very crucial role in this VR experience. To simulate the sense of comfort and relaxation "Rachael's theme" a soundtrack composed by Vangelis was used.
References
Please visit the following link to view in-depth research and system design for ecommerce
Who is this brand for?
BIE is a brand for everyone who is ready to transform themselves,
Focused on metamorphosis, the brand has several categories of products for people at different stages of life1.
1. Thriving teenager #BiEteenclub
2. Working professional #BiEconofsucess
3. Blushing bride & groom #BridetoBiE/GroomtoBie
4. New mom #MamaBiE
5. Homemaker #BiEyoundhome
6. Mental health #BiEwithyou
7. 50 is the new 30s #EternalBiEuty
8.Skincare junkie #BiEaskinventor
Scope of work
BIE is focused to provide high tech beauty solutions and build communities enabling the users to interact and grow with the brand.
Scope of work as a UX/UI designer is to design end to end user experience for the digital platform of BIE, ranging from website to mobile application.
The brand is highly focused on community led growth, and hence the web platform needs to promote the idea. The journeys (metamorphosis) needs to be integrated in the digital platform.
Logo
The logo for Beauty by BiE is designed by DY works, a Mumbai based advertising design agency
Starting with the information architecture
The website to follow the structure from the system study mentioned Here
Example journey for category “New Mom”
Mobile-first ensures that one delivers the right User Experience (UX) to the right screen. With such limited space available on a mobile phone screen designing for that makes far more sense for the UX. Designers must prioritise the elements of the website that are most important to create a strong base to work from
The website is going to be custom made using Shopify, so all the backend features are well integrated and are Shopify default.
Frontend design needs to be provided to vendors for development of consumer facing applications.
Keeping in mind all the essential features required for the brand the first iteration of wireframe was done for three main pages, Homepage, PLP(Product listing page)
And PDP(Product description page). Based on the aesthetics of these pages, all the other pages will be designed.
Global nav
Having the hamburger menu and search button as essentials. The logo covers the centre part.
Bottom bar
Bottom bar has 4 icons indicating home, Wishlist, cart and profile
Product unit
A product unit is showed with a product image and description, as soon as one hovers over the product, the add to cart and Wishlist becomes visible
Cart unit
There are many actions that a customer might do on the cart page and the aim was to give them all the control on the cart page itself
While working on the project I learnt to understand the brand in and out to be able to do justice it and give the customer, optimal experience. It was an iterative process and took many changes at each and every level to achieve the final outcome, if you are interested to dive deeper into the project, contact me and we can discuss this on detail.
Thank you
I actively participated in brainstorming with my team to identify problem and define HMW statement. We did crazy 8 ideation method to identify several solutions
I wore the hat of product manager in the team and with the help of leads, defined the feature requirements for the MVP
I bridged the gap between our team and legal to get understand blockers and get necessary approvals
I designed the user flow for the product based on the scope of MVP and keeping in mind the Legal requirements
I planned the marketing strategy for our product. We used Google ads and Meta ads to gain traction
We launched our MVP on 27th August 2022
As a team we identified several gaps in product flow and tried to improve based on what data suggested
We pitched our product to get funding for future explorations. However we were not funded and we had to decommission our product
Get in touch, connect on social media and lets make the world a better place together
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