A LITTLE TOUR OF DESIGN INTERNSHIP AT TRELL!
During the summer of 2021, amidst a global pandemic, I got the opportunity to intern at Trell as a UI/UX Designer. During this Internship I worked on a lot of things which consisted of designing new features, improving existing features, user experiences, and user journeys.
Trell is India’s largest lifestyle social commerce platform. Empowering millions of storytellers and micro Entrepreneurs. More about trell
Let’s take a quick dive into my work experience at trell.
P.S. It is not a detailed guide so don’t expect tons of iteration screens and big paragraphs on the design processes. Hope you’ll enjoy it.
Kick-starting the Internship with…
1. Redesigning the follow button
Problem: The follow button was not clear with its functionality.
Solution: It was a very simple task. I just have to design a new button that will be clear and understandable. I designed two iterations. After discussing with the team iteration 1 was discarded as it was too bold and grabbed too much attention. Iteration 2was finalized and was sent to developers.
Although this was a very little task to do I learned a lot from this. I learned how a descent size design team works, collaborating with the PMs and APMs was very fun and intriguing, got a little bit of knowledge of how the back end team works. Overall I was feeling more confident and super pumped up for the next 3 months
2. Introducing the lock feature on the creator’s profile.
Pain point: Low following rate of the new content creators (change)
Research: From the research team we got the info that new content creators are facing problems regarding followers. Users are watching them regularly but are not following them, as a result, their followers are not increasing.
The Solution: So after a lot of brainstorming sessions with the team I came with the idea of a locking feature!
How will it work?
Remember the barter system? Where people exchange services and goods for other services and goods in return. I employed the same technique here. All the videos of the content creator will be locked except the latest one. To see the other videos, users will first have to follow the creator, by doing this all the videos will be unlocked and ready to watch. Creators get more followers and users get to see more interesting videos
Outcome: In the AB testing we found out that follow rate increased by 11% for the new content creators in the first two weeks. And as a surprise, we found out that there was a 9% increment in followers for the famous content creators
3. Designing rating popup
Task: To increase the rating of the Trell app on the play store
Solution: Designing a rating pop-up.
Key Decisions:
1. Taking 4 & 5 Star reviewers to the play store.
2. To maintain low star reviewers to the app itself. So that they didn’t lower the rating on the play store
3. Showing pop up to the daily users will be on priority.
So designing part was not that tough, I’ve taken inspiration from dribbble and Behance and has kept the designs very simple.
As the majority of our users are from tier2 and tier3 cities
I was told by my manager Saurish that you will be designing for tier 2 and tier 3 cities so I was already well versed, on how will I be designing. I spent starting days of intern researching about how the design works for tier 2 and tier 3 cities and explores a lot of apps doing the same.
Started co-working with other designers on…
4. Designing hashtag feature for videos.
So the design team was already working on this feature which will allow creators to tag their videos with different hashtags. Hashtags will improve their reach and will allow them to spread their work to a wider audience. I was assigned to design the UX part of adding hashtags.
I tried taking inspiration from Twitter and Instagram but these apps are having hashtag feature from the start and DO NOT SPECIFICALLY direct users to any hashtag section and users somehow already know how to use it.
For the tier 2 and 3 users, we needed something that will tell/guide them about hashtags while posting their content.
I sketched two low-fidelity wireframes and just randomly posted a poll for these two low-fi wireframes on our UX design team slack channel and waited for the results
80% voted for Iteration 1 and 20% Voted for iteration 2. Seeing the poll result’s my manager told me to directly design high fidelity wireframe for Iteration 1.
5. Designing order confirmation screens.
A major problem with the app on the commerce side was, after payment completion the app was not showing that the order is confirmed or not rather screen was going all black and was returning to the home page, leaving users in serious confusion about their order confirmation. To check if their order was successfully placed or not a general step would be going to my order section but even here they will not be able to find the instant status of the order as the app takes some time to update orders.
So the commerce team gave us the requirement of designing screens that would solve this problem.
After payment completion, there can be two cases.
Case1. Payment is completed but order confirmation is pending.
Case2. Payment is completed and successfully placed.
But Before designing these screens I redesigned the payment confirmation screen that would be consistent with the design of these 2 cases.
I was told by the commerce team that after payment completion the maximum time it takes to show, that an order is confirmed or not in 60 seconds. So I decided to put a timer on the screen with a message so that the users are not clueless about what is happening. This also makes the experience more engaging and informative.
I have kept the design very simple and clear and have rather put more emphasis on UX writing because a user has already spent quite some time ordering a product and can be easily frustrated if the design is very text-heavy or have a high visual clutter. Using icons and crisp text was a good decision as it is clearly understandable to a greater audience.
6. Designing a trending search bar menu.
On a nice Friday evening, a PM from the commerce side pinged me “Hey Tanishk are you free this weekend” and the conversation goes like this
Me: “yup “
PM: “Can you explore Trell’s website and list some points where we can improve”
Me: “Yes definitely would love to work on Trell’s website”
After this conversation, I directly jumped on Trell’s website and noted down some of the points/problems, and messaged him the next day. He picked the problem with the search bar and asked me to start working on it.
Problem with the search bar
While searching for a product on a website when you click on the search bar it either shows you trending products or product categories but the Trell’s website was lacking this.
As the category section was already there we decided to go with trending products. Creating this section in the search bar would enhance the search experience and more importantly will help in increasing sales.
Designing this was more of UI than UX. I simply designed the cards for products using aesthetic images and drop shadows.
“Sometimes working on a weekend can be fun”
7. Redesigning star rating in the product review section
Since I prev. worked on rating popup screens I got my hands on designing similar things for the commerce side. In the previous designs, stars were very dull and boring my work was to make it more lively and catchy.
In redesigning I used colors, emotions, and shapes for the different states of rating to make every rating distinct and fun. From this exercise, I got to learn a lot about the Colour Theory and how to apply it. Although it was a very small task but I got to learn a lot from this, underestimating a small task is never a good idea.
8. Designing WhatsApp opt-in feature for order tracking.
As a majority of our customers are from tier 2 and tier 3 cities they generally did not open their mail to check their order status rather depend on SMS to enhance the experience of order tracking we needed something else.
We did a Competitive analysis and it was a good way to find out what other e-commerce companies in the same lifestyle segment like Meesho, Naykaa are doing. We found out that they are using WhatsApp to give updates to the users. Getting inspiration from this we decided to go ahead with it.
Designing the WhatsApp update card was pretty easy. A clear-cut text with a CTA was all I need. Also designed a popup to show that now they’ll be getting order updates for a good UX
9. Designing Product Widget
Trell has two sides social and commerce and there are creators on trell who make lifestyle videos on products that are present in the trell shop. Now if a user wishes to buy the same product he will have to go to the shop section and search it manually.
To solve this problem, there were 2 options
1. Link: There will be a product link that will be present on the screen guiding the user directly to the product
2. Product Widget: A sliding widget containing all the information of the product and also allowing users to directly add the product to the bag
We researched and iterated upon both the options and decided to go with the widget as it is
1. Leads to fast decision-making.
2. More interactive.
3. More descriptive
4. Good visibility
My fellow intern designed the product widget card and I designed the interaction part. I decided to only show some part of the widget with an arrow rather than showing it completely with an as the screen was already full with different elements. Users can either slide the widget or click on the arrow to see it completely
The final leg
10. By working on Guided UI
The trell app is just not a video watching app, it has a lot of features that sometimes make it overwhelming to some new users. To guide these new users on how to navigate and operate we decided to introduce UI guiding. In this project, I did UX writing and worked with a fellow designer, and made some cool very basic motion design.
It was a very slow-paced internship I was given enough time to learn and explore. During the internship, I also worked with some awesome graphic designers and helped them with little tweaks and suggestions. Designed a full catalog of categories for the commerce side and emailers. Townhall sessions with the co-founders were really amazing and informative. Those long discussions with PMs and the backend team significantly helped me in improving my communication skills. Altogether it was really a nice experience and has given a much-needed boost to my design career.
