As you know, Flipkart and Amazon are the giants in the e-commerce space of India where mobile app shopping is a key part as smartphones have now become an integral part of our lives. While Amazon revamps its mobile UI quite often, it’s been long since Flipkart has brought any major overhaul until now!
Yes, Flipkart has brought a completely new UI into its shopping app aimed to make your shopping experience even better and more convenient. Flipkart says, with millions of first-time internet users exploring e-commerce not just from metros but from tier 2 and tier 3 cities, it was imperative to create a user experience that caters to the diverse needs of the users.
New Flipkart shopping app
As part of the design revamp process, Flipkart has introduced design changes that will enable seamless navigation between various categories of products and services, and make the experience intuitive for millions of diverse customers.
To help new customers who are exploring Grocery shopping online for the first time and as Flipkart expands the availability of groceries across 1,800 cities, there is a separate and more visible tab available for Grocery on the homepage as part of the new design.
The enhanced design changes are based on the user design principles around uniformity, predictability, and ease of use and helped build a people-first app design.
Commenting on the design revamp, Bharath Ram, Vice-President, User Activation and Retention at Flipkart, said, “User experience and design is a crucial part of providing a holistic e-commerce experience for existing and new-to-internet customers, and we, at Flipkart, are committed to building a simple and intuitive experience for them. A multidisciplinary team of designers, researchers, product managers, and engineers worked together to build the new design, which offers a refreshed user experience of our mobile app with a simplified navigation framework and a host of other design enhancements to enable easy discoverability of categories and seamless navigation across the platform, thereby simplifying customers’ e-commerce journey. The introduction of the Grocery tab on the homepage is one such design upgrade which will allow customers fast access to a category that is very important in everyone’s lives and is in line with the fast expansion of Flipkart’s grocery presence across the country.”
According to Flipkart’s design experts, a key part of providing an intuitive user experience is creating simple information architecture and common patterns that enable users to discover and logically navigate on a mobile device. This assumes significance, particularly for the new-to-internet customers, so they can seamlessly navigate the app to discover and find products without a learning curve.
With the newly redesigned app, users will be able to switch between shopping via the homepage, browsing different categories, viewing notifications and past orders, and finishing their purchases in the cart, all in the bottom navigation.
Some of the other design changes include:
- Consolidation of navigation buttons to help provide the space for quick links to frequently accessed categories such as Grocery, where people are making multiple purchases in a month
- Grocery tab on top to enable customers quickly switch between essential and other requirements
- A simplified “discovery” menu below the search bar, containing features such as SuperCoins, Stores, Flipkart Feeds, Offer Zone, and more
- The hamburger menu and the top has been removed, and the bottom bar has been revamped with icons for ‘Home’, ‘Notifications’ and ‘Cart’ in the latest design
- My Orders has been housed under My Account in the bottom navigation
Easier discovery with the Grocery tab
Grocery is one of the fastest-growing segments in e-commerce today, with an increasing number of consumers turning to online grocery shopping for convenience and reliability. Flipkart aims to make grocery shopping faster and easier for its users and the placement of the Grocery tab at the top of the homepage is designed to enable quick access to this service. The new Grocery tab on the homepage will be visible for users in the 10,000 pin codes across 1,800 cities serviceable by Flipkart Grocery.
In the last year, Flipkart has introduced several newer categories, and there was an opportunity to shorten the gap in consumer experience through simplification of navigation and enhancement of design for an easy experience. About six variations of the navigation design were A/B tested with thousands of customers for over two months, and qualitative insights were also gathered through user research, which helped build a people-first app design. The new bottom navigation design led to more than 5-times higher engagement compared to the previous version.
This development is in line with Flipkart’s constant efforts to elevate customer experience on the platform while making their journey seamless. A multidisciplinary team of designers, researchers, product managers, and engineers worked together to build the new design for several months to develop the new design for Flipkart which is currently being implemented in phases starting with the navigation experience. This will be followed by a design revamp of fonts, icons, category pages, and vernacular language interfaces and will also be made available on iOS, mobile web and desktop platforms.
