Rest two are choices that, in retrospect, worked well for the product. You’d notice that the earlier versions of Instamojo looked right out of Web 1.0 world. It looks empty and unpolished as compared to how it looks now:
It was a conscious choice to keep it empty & looking like the way it did. The choices weren’t based on what looked good or what was trendy. They were based on priorities, costs, and resources at hand. It helped us ship & evolve fast, and maintain the product with low time & effort.
Structuring the Product
There’s often a temptation to fill up your new product to make it look more ‘mature’ and avoid the ‘emptiness’. You try to fill up the empty space with features and complexity that your product doesn’t even need.
Most of the decisions at this point are made on big assumptions with almost no data. Every item in navigation, every “segment” or “vertical” a product has is a decision that brings even more decisions with it. Keep it so simple that you’re almost ashamed.
Products are like trees. They don’t grow in a day or a year. They are constantly evolving to respond to their environment & interactions. If you fluff-it up today, there won’t be any room left when the real growth comes.
You will have a lot of paradigm shifts as you design your product, layer-by-layer, over the years. Keep a lot of room for errors. It’s easier to iterate and completely change a simple product. This emptiness is your margin-of-safety, the more the better.
During 5 years of evolving our product, we’ve had no problems adding more verticals to our product. The product is still evolving today without any notable issues in this regard.
Usability & Aesthetics
When I joined Instamojo I was the first designer. And the in-house front-end person. For about 2 years I was designing & coding-up the product with Django templates (they’re horrible), javascript, and CSS.
I had 2 big priorities:
- Design a product that makes sense to the user.
- Make a product that works & ship it fast.
For a designer, its very tempting to make it look like a million dollar product. It’s tempting to apply everything you’ve ever learned. After all this is what you wanted, to build a product from scratch and do it right. Functional and beautiful like no one has seen & done before.
But soon you will realise that you’ve taken on a mammoth task. Just to make sure that it makes sense and is functional takes a lot of work. There are endless layers of details that you will miss out and add over time. The requirements & scope of product will change every other day.
Making it obvious is the goal. Obvious is hard. Sticking to usability principles is the only way to guarantee that your interface is obvious to most people.
In most cases, it means sticking to the medium’s default design choices — be it web, android, or iOS. Sure you won’t trend on dribbble, but your product will be used. That’s everything.
Having simple UI & interaction patterns also helps keep the code base small & maintainable. This means speed, which is an advantage your startup should not lose. Plus, your product developers will love you for that.
For some products, however, aesthetics are a need; not a luxury. Specially vitamin products. But for a pain-killer product like Instamojo, usability was way above the priority list.
It was more productive to invest time & effort improving language, understanding mental models, and information architect; than investing it in aesthetics.
There will come a time when that will change. Aesthetics, visuals, interactions do become important as you try to establish a brand and appeal to a larger audience.
At about 1 Lakh customers, we started investing in those aspects of product & design. At that scale, we left our early adopter phase way behind and were reaching to merchants who were bringing their businesses online for the first time. Including a majority of non-tech savvy customers, who behaved more like consumers. (Therefore expected a consumer product).
We upgraded visual & interaction patterns of the product to take it closer to a consumer product than a developer MVP and redesigned our mobile experience. Doing that while staying true to the usability principles is difficult, but we had Hardik who did an awesome job.
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At the same time, we invested more in understanding our customers. Several people including Apoorv, Namrata, Dalan, and our customer facing teams spent time talking to our customers, testing out prototypes, and improving our product to a point where it could serve double the customer base.
During customer interviews and field visits, customers emphasised our product and services were ‘easy’ to start with and use. That’s where our claim to be India’s Easiest Way to Collect Payments Online came from.