This masterclass by Saptarshi, Assistant Vice President of Design at Swiggy, focuses on how Human Intelligence (HI) and design thinking are crucial for creating excellent user experiences, particularly in product design.
Saptarshi defines a product as something that solves a problem. It tells you what you need to know, and doesn’t tell you what you don’t need to know. He illustrates this with examples like a light bulb using electricity and AirPods Pro’s noise cancellation. Good products, especially well-designed ones, excel at balancing these two aspects.
Design thinking is defined as making smart predictions based on situations, time, and people.Saptarshi demonstrates this concept through scenarios like receiving a missed call at different times from different people and a game where the audience predicts his ice cream preference. He highlights that designers make decisions for millions of users based on limited information.
Turbo Checkout: Swiggy redesigned its checkout process to pre-select payment methods based on user history, reducing a step. The expected outcome was faster checkout, increased sales, and a better user experience. However, it led to an increase in payment failures. This was because users were accustomed to an extra step after hitting the green “pay” button. The solution was to change the button to a slider to prevent accidental taps and create a conscious action.
Cancel Order: Initially, cancelling an order required contacting customer care. Swiggy introduced a 1-minute cancellation window for accidental orders. This change resulted in a double-digit increase in cancellations due to “buyer’s remorse” amplified by a ticking clock. The solution was to remove the ticking clock and reduce the prominence of the cancel button.
Food Page Scroll Behavior: Swiggy experimented with whether the search/filter bar should stick at the top (A) or scroll away (B) . While “A” seemed more convenient to some, “B” actually won because it provided a larger viewport for users to see more restaurants, leading to a more comfortable experience.
Rating System Nuances: The speaker shares an anecdote about a user who rated all her favorite restaurants with one star because she thought “a number one” meant “the best” in Hindi, highlighting that common digital icons and conventions are not universally intuitive.
Saptarshi’s masterclass powerfully illustrates that truly effective product design, particularly in the digital realm, is rooted in human intelligence (HI) and thoughtful design thinking. By examining Swiggy’s real-world challenges with features like Turbo Checkout and Cancel Order, the presentation underscores that understanding subtle user behaviors, habits, and emotional responses is paramount, often overriding technically sound but unintuitive design choices. The core message is that successful design isn’t just about functionality; it’s about making astute predictions based on deeply empathetic user insights to create seamless experiences that align with how people actually think and behave, even when it defies initial logical assumptions.
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