Welcome to our new home - An evolving firm, an evolved online presence
AN EVOLVING FIRM, AN EVOLVED ONLINE PRESENCE
Visionary:
Sanjiv Bajaj
Creators:
Hari Singh
Manish Dhawan
Chahat Abrol
Aabhinna Suresh Khare
We don't replace, we reflect.
Our new digital presence is a juxtaposition of heritage and modernity, of stability and change. Some parts of our organisation are changing enormously, and others - like our commitment towards our clients and their wealth - will always stay the same.
Connecting with our core user requires a lot of effort, but we realised that if we really want to do something, it has to be one-to-one, detailed, including hours and hours of interviews with the users - both existing, and mainly potential.
Then we had to establish a scope out of what our existing design language was - and pick fragments out of it to create a holistic, but dynamic UI style guide - which we plan to keep on improving and evolving for the next 6 months.
THE CHALLENGE
Our challenge was that BajajCapital is a very respected and reputed name within the wealth management and financial industry, but only a few know it in the digital world. Digital people do not consider us as a ‘digital-first’ company. So how do we change that perception? How do we bring in that much-needed digital transformation?
Getting a perspective
There is a stark contrast in how category users behave when it comes to money matters. When it comes to grocery, for example, users want a provision store - “show me everything that you have”, whereas when it comes to finances, users only want to see what’s relevant for them. Plus, they want those things at a certain pace. They want to see things move and grow.
BajajCapital has a ground presence in over a 100 cities across the length and breadth of India, serving all the various needs, desires, ages, even dialects, so how do we create a web presence that caters to all? So we asked ourselves an equivalent question - how to build a nation with all kinds of people? What unites a nation which is separated by innumerable boundaries?
We understood that BajajCapital is India - where there are x amount of priorities to be taken care of, things to be done and yet we keep moving forward, together. What binds India is the very thread that we are all different, and yet together for a common goal.
In the same way that you cannot customise India, but you can have a single view of India where everybody will be respected, every need can be fulfilled, but that’s a tricky situation to solve. So instead of solving everything in one go, we decided to solve the top level pains first.
THE INEVITABLE RE-DESIGN
But first, let's rewind.
How about we throw everything away and start from scratch! Sounds good, right? It’s easier, it’s straight forward. But it doesn’t make sense for us to throw an organic system out the window when it has worked for years for the organisation. AND we just don’t like things easy now, do we? *winks with both eyes*
There were too many problems to solve after all, with new ones emerging each day. Countless requests for “Add a button here”, “Add a popup there” and of course, all need to be done ASAP, all come from different teams that are not in continuous sync with each other, and they come in all the livelong day. All such small design changes had resulted in an incoherent web presence with sites that did not talk to each other, did not take care of user journeys end-to-end and clearly did not follow a set design language. AND all of this hurts the brand. period.
PS. Bonus points if this situation sounds familiar to you, my reader, you've inherited a product at either a high-growth startup, or at a high-growth startupy team resting within a decades-old enterprise, much like ours, trying its best to bring in positive change bit by bit, and you may have found yourself in a similar position yourself.
DESIGN THINKING AND DESIGN DOING
Auditing what we had
Systems have always been in place, but they haven’t been 100% right. Our first step was to study the existing systems and designs and find the good (helps the user), the bad (user doesn't care), and the ugly (deters the user). This was conducted at team level - our team going through the journeys themselves and understanding what impact the frontend brings to the backend. We also screen-recorded users trying our existing platforms and listening to the troubles that they came across.
Auditing what the market offers
We began gauging what kind of experience the market has to offer - both national and global, this was instrumental in getting a hang of what kind of experience our target online users were already used to. For this purpose, we studied close to a hundred companies, shortlisted 40 and took a detailed look on what could work for us out of them and what would be a complete no-no. This study did not limit itself to a single industry but spanned across other verticals that could fall into the same umbrella from a professional services standpoint, also considering that the design direction we took at this point would define not just the company BajajCapital Limited, but also the entire universe of BajajCapital Group of Companies. This landscape spanned across Financial Services, Wealth Management to Management Consulting firms.
Our process in a nutshell
Every organisation has their own tried and tested version of a design thinking process but it’s imperative that you start with a proven model and then try making it into your own. It made absolute sense for us to go with the latest Design Thinking process outlined by Stanford Graduate School of Business - the birthplace of the process.
For us, the process essentially consisted of the following broad 3 phases:
Explore & Immerse: We immersed with Customers and heard their stories around finances, including Investments, savings and managing money; their pains and gains.
HMW & Ideate: We generated multiple HMWs or How Might We statements and ideated on how we could solve for what that customer really needs and wants.
Prototype, Elaborate & Test: Prototyped 3 visual designs and elaborated on them, in close collaboration with our stakeholders.
Who are my users and what do they want and expect
To understand our existing and potential users we took an ‘L’ approach quite literally - first scanned our office complex from ground-up for our target segment within neighbouring offices and spoke to them, then spread on the ground and spoke to real users. 26 in-depth interviews were taken and group discussions conducted by the team, clocking anywhere between 1 hr 20 m to 22 m in each session, to understand their real financial psychology, and their pains and gains around the idea of money and wealth and handling it digitally.
This helped us define our priority user space to begin with:
Collab Central - Problem Space
All of the 100s of insights generated from this exercise had to be controlled and directed to keep them relevant and usable, so the diverging phase could begin and we didn’t overshoot its time. The team got together to begin saturating and clustering the evidence wall (or pillar).
These clusters helped define micro opportunities that were documented in the form of 120+ How Might We statements (HMWs) over a span of 6 brainstorming workshops. Usually when the opportunity space gets this galactic, you need to start bringing in clarity by clearly defining which top level problems are to be taken up as blockers and solved before anything else. Therefore, we divided this problem space up by arranging HMWs together across a macro user journey along a scale of assistance - solving which problem would assist the user in transacting online immediately vs gradually. Thus, we could divide up our project into phases.
Collab Central - Solutioning
Every single HMW in scope was solutioned upon by the team together and we kept this solutioning team as multi-disciplinary as possible - inviting PMs, BAs, Developers, and even HR team members into this. This is the place where we could take all the learnings and discoveries and convert them into actionables that filled up our feature bucket.
REAL INSIGHTS AND HOW WE USED THEM
This understandably unreadable (and intentionally so *evil grin*) site structure is to give a top level glimpse of the expanse of the BajajCapital universe that we were able to put together:
THEN AND NOW: WHAT HAS CHANGED
Below are just a few of the instances that Design Thinking compelled us to improve about the site experience, when compared to the old site to bring a holistic presence together.
COVID - THE ENABLER
Circumstances over the past few months have not been favourable for businesses globally, but we’ve always placed our bets on the silver lining. The pandemic pushed remote work into action, and that for us meant taking cross-team collaboration to a whole new level. Due to the stay-at-home norms we were never ‘disconnected’ from our teams, and collaboration became never ending. It might actually be wise to say that we have not accomplished this feat despite COVID, but because of COVID.
OKAY BUT HAVE YOU TESTED ALL THIS?
Short answer: Yes!
Long answer: We’ve tested with multiple sets of stakeholders. We’ve gone through over 900 QA test cases and another 250 issues that came to light in the UX audit. Some we’ve resolved successfully, others may have contributed to our design debt, but not for long.
Whilst that being said, we’re not free from biases ourselves. We’re not saying we are perfect. We’re not claiming that our new website is perfect, either. But we want to try. We want to make things live. After all, only live sites can ask users for feedback, right? Unless we get hard evidence that a, b, c are the areas that are working great for you, and x, y, and z are the areas that are failing their test, we wouldn’t be able to take things up a notch in the next go (which shall come really soon, amen).
Do you see that small red button on the bottom right that says Feedback; well, use it - pour your heart out, or just come and say hello.
We are beyond excited to welcome you and hear all the things we can do to make the experience and process better.
Cheers to new beginnings!
