How Flipkart Prototypes the Future of E-commerce

Flipkart, India’s biggest e-commerce company, has a big task on its hands.

Since they believe in building beautiful enterprise applications, the company is always looking for that wow factor.

But, as customer tastes and expectations change all the time, approaches to e-commerce UX design has to follow suit.

And as the way we prototype for today will be different from the way we prototype for tomorrow, the UX tools in your tech stack need to be up to the task.

That is what drove Flipkart to ProtoPie.

How Flipkart design teams use ProtoPie.

In our latest webinar, we met Prateek Gupta, Product Design Lead at Flipkart. He works within the B2B vertical at the company, where his main job is to

• Build products that are used by brands and sellers to run their advertisement campaigns on the Flipkart App.
• Help users achieve their goal to increase visibility and sell their products as soon as possible.

How do they do it? Let’s find out.

Every product needs to have a vision

Even as a kid, we all have a vision of what we want to be and for what our tomorrow is going to be like.

For example, if you wanted to be a doctor, you would start working on it today, so maybe tomorrow you could become one. (Well, maybe not literally tomorrow, but someday.)

The same goes for products.

“Every product needs a vision of what its ideal state will be,” Prateek tells us. “The North Star of the product. What it will be like after five or even eight years.”

Product designers don’t just design for how the product works today, but also for the future.

That means the product lifecycle is an endless process.

You can never say that the product is just for one year, because it won’t end there. You keep on building new features and improving existing ones according to changing user needs.

And when it comes to product design, there is not just one stakeholder that you have to impress.

They need to think in the same way you think, and that is where prototyping comes in.

So, as a designer, you need to consider two things:

1. What you built today.
2. What you build tomorrow

Prototyping for today vs. prototyping for tomorrow.

Prototyping for today

Today is when you talk about the design process, and define and ideate prototypes.

It is when you try to understand:

• What the customer pain points are, and how your product is going to solve them.
• The incremental changes in the current ecosystem.

At Flipkart, they try to build their understanding through feedback sessions, workshops, and desk research, using artefacts like:

• Research findings
• Mockups
• Wireframes
• Prototyping

Using these artefacts, Flipkart wants to find out: “How can we give the best in-class experience to our users?

Prototyping, according to Prateek, helps them save time and money on finding the answers to that by validating different solutions quickly.

Prototyping for tomorrow

Tomorrow is when you talk about the long-term design vision and value of the product.

You ask yourself: How will your product look like after two years, five years, or even eighth years?

Inevitably, your product will need to adapt to serve changing user needs, and that’s when you start talking about:

• Product innovation, because why limit yourself to the current tech? In the future, there will be new advancements in technology, like AI/ML and AR.
• Using artefacts like storyboarding, conceptual designs and prototypes to envision how the future will look.

For Flipkart at this stage, prototyping helps everyone get on the same page and work towards the vision by building that imagination.

How Flipkart uses ProtoPie

Prototypes do more than just letting the user see the product. With prototypes, you can step into the future while taking tomorrow’s technology into account.

Above all, it is a method to get all stakeholders to think in the same direction.

Let’s look at an e-commerce UX example that shows how Flipkart put ProtoPie to the test.

ProtoPie Example: Flipkart’s Issue Management System

The issue management system (IMS) is the most important part of any product, as it is the place users go when they have issues.

Flipkart Issue Management System Case Study.

When prototyping for today:

• Flipkart’s goal is to build the world’s best IMS that can help users when they are stuck completing their daily tasks.
• The user need is to raise a ticket in case they have issues or questions about the product.
• The measures the team tracks is adoption, efficiency, and number of campaigns created.

Prototyping for today.

But, when they talk about tomorrow:

• Flipkart's goal is to build a product where the user does not need an IMS to complete their daily tasks.
• The user need is to be able to complete their tasks with no issues.
• The metric they track is ‘no issues raised.’

In previous iterations, Flipkart made it easy to access the help section in the user dashboard.

But, using ProtoPie, they revolutionized the UX design of the IMS to minimize the need for any help at all.

In the visual below, you can see how they changed the design to give contextual information the user needs to complete their tasks.

Prototyping for tomorrow.

ProtoPie gave them the tools to handle new approaches to digital product design and app prototyping in e-commerce.

“It won’t work” is now no longer part of their stakeholders’ vocabulary.

Instead, they say “yes, we can do it.”

Why the Flipkart design team loves ProtoPie

Thanks to ProtoPie, Flipkart can now quickly and easily create prototypes to express their ideal future online shopping UX.

Here are only a few of the reasons why they love ProtoPie:

• Web Tool: ProtoPie is easy to access from anywhere and any device.
• ProtoPie Studio: An amazing studio that gives you tons of functionalities and features.
• Seamless Integration: As Flipkart is a big company, they always need to consider how to use the integration with their existing products that they use in design.
• Share & Collaborate with Team Features: Another great feature that makes it easy to get feedback while working on prototypes.
• Build for the Future: When designing for tomorrow, you need a product that actually allows you to build products for the future. ProtoPie does exactly that.

Why Flipkart designers love ProtoPie.

Lead the future of e-commerce UX innovation with ProtoPie

Flipkart and 15,000 other companies use ProtoPie as their go-to UX prototyping tool. Download ProtoPie for free now to get started for yourself!