Checking the Effectiveness of our Design @CreditMate
In the constant journey of product design & development, we learn a ton. I’ve been designing professionally for over a year or so and early on, my focus had always been visually appealing designs that made people go “WOAH!”. Now that I have a little experience on the product development cycle and what it takes to implement your designs till you can say “We’re live!” and further beyond that.
A common mistake we all do is to immediately iterate on the product we already took enormous effort to implement. When we’re all in the adrenaline to keep making changes and constantly be delivering — we forget to learn. If you’re constantly delivering, you’ll never be able to optimise, never be able to help business, never be able to take a deep breath and see how your designs help the larger world (do they?)
A good way to measure effective design is to understand what works and what doesn’t. This deserves a lot of patience and resistance of that urge that tells you to ship more.
At CreditMate, we as a team delivered a wonderful product on Web, targeting mass market India. My workflow was pretty much: Sketch →Push to Zeplin →Ask Developers to Implement →Reiterate to make it better.
Here’s a screenshot of our homepage on the web (Mobile first).
While fun, designing is not just barely visual. It also means connecting your goals with the business. Here are some of our goals as a business:
- Understanding if Multilingual Languages work better for few Markets. (For e.g. We saw marketing campaigns being more effective when Gujarat was marketed w/ Hindi Advertisements)
- Reducing Marketing Spend & reduce CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) and tweak marketing to make PPC keywords better and work on optimising the web better + work on our Google Analytics goals to see major cliffs in the product.
So what do you do in your spare time when your users are constantly using the website? You check analytics and examine data to help the business.
Steps to do this:
- Google Analytics (The good ol’ companion for a Bird’s Eye View)
We initially (as we all know what change does) saw an extremely high bounce rate. This was normal because we hadn’t optimised for the market we’re targeting. Once we started optimising and got our product closer and tested experiences on the devices our target audiences would use, it became clearer to us on However, in the long term we’re progressing and getting better at what we could do right to make it better.
Increase in Session Length over time and a gradual reduce in the Bounce Rate, helps us understand that users are interested moving around on our website & invested in it.
Right now, we’re here. This is a month apart from the previous screenshot. Fairly good, but a lot more work to be done to see more progress & lots more to learn.
2. Using a Tool to monitor and learn insights from Users using Recordings & Reports (We use LuckyOrange which costs $10 per month and is pretty comprehensive & provides us a lot of data on what to do next)
For example, with the tool, we could see on how users have matured over time with respect to mobile number. Earlier in 2015–2016, mobile number was considered to be the undeniably the best way to onboard users and authenticate their unique identity.
2 years down the line, we see how people have overused this and what it has led to, today. With everyone using mobile number as the prime differentiator, people are scared to give their mobile number anymore, because of relentless calls & SMS. Our dwell time on mobile number is higher than the other fields, that’s Name and Income.
This, when I shared with a panel of designers who design/make products at an institutional level at a sweet event organised by CGAP, came to them as a shock, because they normally get people to lie/get scared to reveal their income. Different worlds, similar problems.
3. Element Analytics to determine Interface Changes
In a tight knit team, redesigns are expensive, in terms of time, business and $. This is why, element analytics help us understand which elements work better than the others. This gives us an idea on the mental models users have been trained to use and leverage those models to let them understand our design.
I hope this short read might have given you a few ideas on how to get better at product design once you ship your product. I’d love to receive additional feedback if you could visit and check our product → http://creditmate.in
You can reach out to me at swapnil.b[at]creditmate.in for any interesting feedback/insights on our product so we can learn more from you, just as you learnt more from us :)
