bb aka bigbasket through the eye of a product design intern 👀

Big Basket is one of the largest online grocery super market in India. Customers order groceries through online website and bb app which is delivered to their doorstep. Bigbasket has a valuation of 1.8 Billion dollars. It has now reached the unicorn status. The company size is approximately 10,001+ employees.

My Experience

Since I am a Product Designer and work on improving experiences, I will talk about my experience at the grocery giant of India.

I was working as a Product Design Intern at Big Basket. My task included bridging gaps between conceptualization to visual design. So lucky was I to get an opportunity to work alongside great design interns, design leads, product managers and development team.

Tho, the office is in Bangalore city, I was working in a WFH model owing to the current pandemic situation. The time I spent at Big Basket taught me more about a professional environment. I have completed internships with many startups but this was my first time working with the top designers from industry and in one of the biggest grocery app of India.

Working for TATA was always a dream and since Big Basket is now owned by TATA group, I could realize this dream of mine.

During my tenure at BB, I was made to feel like an employee and not just an intern which I am really thankful for. There are 3 design teams and my team name was “Creative Claude”. We would start our day with a team warm-up call, where everyone would share their work, progress and happenings of their life so that we could contribute in the team building. Each Wednesday, we would arrange 1-hour google meet and play games like Pictionary, Fake artist, etc., for team boding which was fun.

Sharing good Medium reads and memes were a daily ritual. To be honest, those people at Big Basket were so supporting that they became a family in so less time. The work-life balance was amazing. I got a lot of exposure working on a project that is yet to release in the market along with the existing main grocery app of bigbasket.

Timeline

My First Week

The whole week went by understanding BB and skimming through various documents and design files to understand the scope of the project I have to work upon. I got a basic KT by the Design Team.

I sketched out a user flow to purchase an item. I researched about the user’s preference and mental model that made them buy a product. I went about and tried using the Big Basket app in detail while interacting with features and understanding various entry & exit point of a user.

Let’s roll out project wise and swim through my bb journey

Project 1: Designing Melon UI Screens

1. The complete BB app is getting revamped and they have designed a complete Design system based on — The Atomic Design by Brad Frost i.e. atoms to molecules to organisms to template to page structure. The new design system (DS) of BB is named as Melon Design system. It makes sense as the color of Big Basket- green and red pretty much aligns with those of a Melon. I believe that the melon design system is a reel melon that will be instrumental in the same sweet & fresh user experience as a real melon. Through the new DS, the problem of inconsistency across the platform is being solved.
2. I had to understand the foundation, components and patterns that forms the heart of the design system. These are the most important assets used to design screens and a thorough knowledge of each component was required and that is why I read through the whole documentation a number of times.
3. The flows were divided among the team members. I got to work on 3 flows independently- Checkout Flow, bb star Flow and Payments. I started with the designing of Melon UI Screens, i.e., the screens for the main app of Big Basket- the grocery app.
4. The first one was the Checkout Flow. I logged in and understood all the use cases possible for each page and made audits/reports regarding the same. Once I was clear with all such requirements, I went ahead and started making SKU(Stock keeping Units) Decks for different pages for both IOS & Android. Various components that were left out in DS and were required in these particular flows were designed by me. Since the revamped product is yet to hit the market.

I have attached a glimpse of my work as most of it is still under NDA(Non-Disclosure Agreement).

Project 2: UAT for Fresho App

1. I was asked to assist my design lead in completing UAT for Fresho FMCG that will be released soon.
2. UAT (User Acceptance Testing) was a fresh experimentation for me. A document was shared with me to understand the UAT process. I tested the build both IOS & Android versions.

“User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is the final stage of any software development life cycle. This is when actual users test the software to see if it is able to carry out the required tasks it was designed to address in real-world situations. UAT tests adherence to customers’ requirements. UAT testers aim to validate changes that were made against original requirements.”

3. A strict timeline was followed. There were 4 sets of UAT done which involved calls with developers to explain them the problems and seek fixation of the build as per the proposed design.

4. We tested the initial set of builds in hqa3 environment. I was added to the VPN network of BB and then I got app distribution-firebase which I used to download the debug app(build).I started testing it by taking screenshots then validating those by keeping the design mocks aside.

5. The dev team would check for requirements and I would then documents
all what is possible and out of scope.

6. Till now I was working as an Alpha tester and representing the design team upfront along with my senior to discuss the scope of features and bugs in the build with the dev team.

7. We kept a track of issues by maintaining a record of the open, closed and phase-2(RFP), simply logging data each day.

Project 3: Design File Structure

1. Started working on File Organization in Figma which was much needed for better team collaborations and consistency. A skeleton was constructed on how to deliver and save files in Figma with a cover, about, research, design, explorations and other such pages that will be consistent across each time.
2. Why this: After onboarding and KT, the newly added felt lost and had to go through a lot of people to understand the work and start-off was delayed by days since no information was logged in at one place.
3. What I did: I took interviews of my seniors and interns those who joined new to understand what all challenges they faced when they got their first project. So, I prepared one deck and kept the interview as a chit-chat sessions where my objective was to understand their journey instead of directly asking the question. The effective practice what I believe is to keep “think-aloud protocol” to best understand the mind frame of the interviewing candidate.
4. After interviewing the employees at BB, I prepared a deck to show the How might we(HMW) slides where I discussed problems, insights and recommendations.
5. To my surprise, I got some off topic but valuable recommendations around onboarding experience too.
6. After gathering all required information, I made 20+ iterations for cover pages, 12 + for about page and like this many iterations were carried out by me and shortly after that I was joined by another intern from a different design team to collaborate on this project with me. Interestingly, even she is a NIFT student like me but from a different campus.
7. The final file organization skeleton contains designs and flows structure. Since every project will be now structured as per the file norms, this will call for better collaborations among teams and would enable super structured system as all info will be available at same place in a similar format readily available at hand.

Deck prepared to voice out the problems, insights and recommendations for HMW session

Ps: don’t judge me 😝 as I go crazy while iterating and dump all info and then work out on it step-by-step. These are just for the trailer sake, real number was much more lol.

Components designed to be used within the file

To mark the progress of each flow so as to enable better understanding of fellow mates, PM’s and Devs for a smooth hand-off

Project 4: Fresho Design System

1. For starting out with Design System of Fresho app, I went through the Melon DS(BB’s main DS). Since Fresho app is already in production, some guidelines were already set but I could figure major issues when it came to consistency and following material design standards.
2. Because of issues like this, I started with auditing portions of foundations, components and patterns that makes up for the Design System pillars. The inspiration was taken from Seeds DS, Melon DS, Atlassian DS, Carbon DS & Lightning DS.
3. A deep study was done of various DS to understand, how to connect dots and formulate a easy to use Design System with helpful guidelines. Again, the Atomic Design by Brad Frost was followed i.e. atoms to molecules to organisms to template to page structure.
4. I along with my senior decided upon naming the Design System as Fresh Melon or Lemon DS. These Fresho Designs has green in abundance and the concept and look is so fresh and rejuvenating that fresh or melon does justice to the nomenclature.
5. The auditing process of Buttons that are used throughout Fresho is done and as per understanding that Big Basket forms the skeleton of major apps owned by BB, it was important to check for consistencies and see if some button sizes are constant throughout.

Showing a few because of NDA restrictions.

Example to show auditing was done for each button size and similarly other components to look out for any inconsistency

A preview of landing page and buttons(components) from Fresh Melon DS

Learnings

The internship at bigbasket was one of the happiest and cherished time of my life because not only did I got a chance to work at a Unicorn stage company, which is a part of TATA but also create connections and build a professional contact list.

My design knowledge, my emotions as a designer were all tested during the internship period and I did not only learn about the company and its organizational structure but also about the process that is followed & how many hiccups come into play. I could understand the real life scenarios where after the designs are signed off the next major challenge is to get them produced as per the standards in the right way for our customers.

I was working as a Product Design Intern, my task was to balance empathy and pixels and strike a balance that best suits the needs of the consumers.
The most important takeaway for me would be how important is to analyze the use cases and to design for the worst case scenario first. By the medium of these projects I got to again revise those UX principles and theories.

What another thing I learned was communication is the most important asset and no matter how good a designer you are if you are not good at communicating then things might not go so well for you. Designers are free spirited animals and like fun and breaks while working. I used to schedule Wednesday Team chillin’ sessions named as “Whoop it up ✌️” and organized different game activities for the team to bond.

Overall, the experience was extremely beneficial and has inspired me to
design more with heart, soul and empathy for the billion users in the world.

I am super happy that I got to work at bb with the most amazing team. Ps: I am really doing my Chandler dance move, hahaha 😆

© Vibhuti Gupta | 2021