How Flipkart is tweaking its user interface to win diverse customers

It maps customers on buying habits, not age, location or income, due to which it no longer pitches iPhones to a consumer just because he belongs to the right age group

Boxing customers into age and income classifications to predict their purchase behavior is an imperfect science, to say the very least. But in India, even more so, given the frustrating diversity that retailers encounter in tastes within a demographic, locational or income category. At Flipkart, a team of data scientists has been trying to make patterns out of the chaotic jumble of data points dropping into their system every day. The result: a shelf full of labels that flip in and out of screens, based on purchase behaviour rather than geography or income. Or in terms of the prevalent terminology, a more fluid and intuitive user interface that does not pitch iPhones to a consumer just because he belongs to the right age group.

Speaking at the sidelines of the TiE Global Summit last week Ram Papatla, VP Product Management, Flipkart said, “It is important to understand what kind of emotional and functional elements that the brand should evoke for every consumer.  For a tier-2 customer the quality and affordability is more important. For a metro consumer it might be speed, brand and reviews.” Within metros too there are sharp differences in tastes and demands within the same age and gender classifications.

In the ever intensifying struggle for market dominance, every customer counts for e-commerce giant Flipkart. The e-tailer is increasingly tinkering with new user interface (UI) trends to provide every user a unique shopping experience.

He added that while customer profiling based on location, gender or lifestage are not used given the complex customer spread across the country. They are increasingly seeing customers, from tier-2 and tier-3 cities, which are well versed in brands and product quality and know what they are looking for so the profiling needs to be multi-faceted.

There are nuances to customer behavior, understanding which could help one e-commerce brand stand apart from another. At the summit, Prashan Agarwal, COO of music streaming app Gaana discussed the need to understand the many realities of the Indian market while designing UI. "While there is a need to accommodate native search queries into the broad framework it is paramount that we not go into this with big town biases. One cannot profile customers by location. Another thing to keep in mind is that while the Jio wave has brought internet to many, connectivity will still be an issue in far flung areas, so there is a need to design UI which works smoothly in low bandwidth."

This is true not just for e-commerce players, UI is how brands across the spectrum of digital services are seeking to separate themselves from the clutter. That is also why many are betting heavily on voice, the entertainment platform Zee5 as well as Amazon Prime Music have introduced services that can be used via voice commands. It is found to work better with Indian consumers in certain categories.

This is also a feature that Future Group’s Easy Day retail platform promises to offer subscribers. Amazon has already introduced smart speakers powered by intelligent voice assistant software in mid-February. A similar understanding is driving work at Amazon Music India. "We hope to change the way customers interact with the music world with this voice based control. We have a like dislike button on the Prime music app that helps us customise recommendations. Currently, Alexa understands English (keywords) but as we keep learning from customers, we will keep adding more languages," said Sahas Malhotra, director Amazon Music India at the launch of Amazon Prime Music services.

As Flipkart penetrates further into non-metro regions, the focus on UI is becoming even more critical. As there are many first time users who need handholding through the shopping process. “They won’t say a white shirt with black polka dots. The query will just be white shirt and we have to work to understand what this customer is looking for beyond that in terms of gender, occasion, material etc,” said Papatla. The underlying UI program then goes on to ask consumers various queries to understand their exact requirement and narrow their search through what they call “conversation”.

As requirements around various categories differ, so do the basic queries. Papatla adds that UI trends will undergo changes rapidly with a lot of research resources dedicated to streamline customer experience globally with voice inputs likely to replace soft keyboards in near future. “This is an experimental phase for UI. I don’t think anybody has a silver bullet.  The basic idea is to understand customer intent through any possible way be it through voice command or even pictures,” he said.

The aim of every UI is to deliver an experience that keeps customers coming back for more. And at Flipkart that has been the singular goal of its team launching the grocery services (it has started with a limited trial for users in Bangalore). With the likes of Big Basket and Amazon increasingly expanding their presence in groceries, Flipkart wanted to make a mark. Bringing about a more user friendly interface required Flipkart to change its usual buying model where users spend some time and a number of visits to make large purchases.  Grocery required a faster, single visit approach which was attained by providing an app-in-app experience.

“So the entire UI has been changed to mimic front of the aisle and back of the aisle which are very typical to buying grocery. They are tailored for the primary household decision maker who is usually a woman. The entire experience is built such that you can add ten things in the basket within few seconds,” said Papatla.

While Flipkart doesn’t share reports on the amount of data collected from users, industry estimates indicate that the platform gets almost 100 terabytes of data from consumer analytics daily. All of this data is put to use in profiling customers beyond “metro single female” and “non-metro married male” types of generic classifications.

 
A key initiative for making new users feel comfortable is to understand what they are likely to buy be it millenials with disposable incomes or users from smaller cities looking for quality products. “There is no point showing them iPhone X on the home screen if they cannot afford it,” Papatla said.