PhonePe App — UI/UX redesign case study

I’m not associated with PhonePe in any way, and the opinions expressed in this case study are entirely my own. This case study isn’t entirely comprehensive as I don’t have full access to all of the usage data that inspired the team’s current design. This case study was created to improve my learning experience and to challenge myself to reimagine it for specific use cases.

WHAT IS PhonePe?

PhonePe is a mobile payment platform using which you can transfer money via UPI, recharge phone numbers, pay utility bills, etc. PhonePe works on the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) system and all you need is to feed in your bank account details and create a UPI ID. There is no need to recharge the wallet because the money will be directly debited from your bank account at the click of a button in a safe and secure manner.

WHY THE REDESIGN?

Being a power user of this app, I noticed that it had become quite difficult to navigate & discover features available on the home screen due to the fact that it was cluttered with information. This led to cognitive overload while making decisions or completing a task.

So, as a UX designer, the scope of the redesign is to identify the pain points experienced by users like me with an aim to provide a suitable design solution based on research and experience.

GOALS AND MOTIVATIONS FOR THE REDESIGN

My goals for the redesign :

• Propose a less cluttered and seamless user flows
• Suggest new features to ease users’ experience.
• To deliver a better experience overall with an intuitive user interface.

My personal goals:

• Take full responsibility for the various roles involved in designing a product such as that of a user researcher, user experience designer, and user interface designer.
• Improve my learning experience by challenging various design decisions and addressing them with probable solutions.

UNDERSTANDING THE USERS THROUGH USER INTERVIEWS

I started the process by conducting user interviews with 15 users which vary from daily active users to infrequent users in order to understand what motivates and demotivates them while using the app.

These interviews were a mixture of video calls and in-person interviews.

The male interviewees’ age ranged from 19 to 50 years old, while the females ranged from 20 to 48 years old, which I felt was a fair
representative sample.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

After identifying and analyzing the user interview data, I defined the following pain points that most users seemed to have trouble with:

• There were many features on the home page that distracted them from selecting the one they wanted to select.
• The Scan QR button was hard to reach while using the phone with one hand.
• Multiple features that were infrequently accessed by users that showed up on the home page were also accessible through other initiation points such as the navbar.
• While in a hurry they would press the wrong buttons as most features are spaced very close to one another.

INTERACTION AND WIREFRAMING

I started prototyping with paper sketching and tried out different screens, layouts to find a better way to declutter the content and improve the whole user experience. After a couple of iterations I developed the following wireframes:

PROPOSED DESIGNS

WHAT I CAN DO BETTER

• Conduct more user interviews to gain a better understanding of various user challenges.
• Learn more about the user research process and try out other user testing & feedback frameworks.
• Work on not letting my personal biases get in the way of problem-solving.

LEARNINGS

This entire project has proven to be a significant learning experience for me as a beginner UX designer. Here are some of my learnings:

1. Interviewing users to understand their problems without leading them on, to hear what you want to hear, is difficult.
2. Keeping your opinions and assumptions separate from what you learn from interviews / the data is not easy.
3. Drafting the case study & putting all my thoughts in place has helped me in understanding the whole process better.
4. To be able to understand an app’s design (both functionally & aesthetically) while guessing the assumptions that would have been made by the app’s designers along with the implemented product use cases has been the most challenging part.

Thank you for taking the time to read my first UI/UX case study! Please take a look at my other work on behance. Please contact me at purohitpratheek@gmail.com if you have any questions. I’d love to hear your thoughts and criticism.