UX Design Internship at Razorpay

Insight from summer training at India’s leading start-up, Razorpay.

Razorpay is now a fast evolving payments company with more than 60,000 merchants across the country. As of recently, the company turned into a converged payments solution company. I interned as a UX designer during the summer of 2017 (May 2017- July 2017).

Selection Process
I applied off-campus for a role of UX designer intern. After shooting mails and portfolio screening, I finally received a mail stating that I was selected for further round. A synchronous video interview was scheduled with the design team. The entire interview lasted for a couple of hours, and questions ranged from basic introduction to in-depth analysis of my portfolio. The entire time, I felt I was in a discussion with a bunch of very talented folks. After waiting eagerly for a week, I received a mail saying I was selected for the internship!

Day-1

Desk encompassing systems, and all the necessary tools of trade.

I was introduced to the entire team personally and through a mail that was shot to everyone. Moreover, I was handed over basic guide to get on board with all the communication and technical tools and channels the company used.

Product KT
It was essentially through product KT, I realised how complicated fin-tech can get, and what Razorpay did. I made notes to understand what and how payment gateways work, what role Razorpay plays in the entire ecosystem and what are its future goals.

notes made during the KTs and product walksthroughs

Project description

Building and analysing user journeys

My summer project entailed creating a new dashboard product, “Offer” for the merchants to run various kind of offers, with multiple entities attached to them. While applying these offers — merchants wanted Razorpay to automatically calculate the valid discount when authorising a payment.

To understand the product; I conducted various stakeholders’ meetings involving people from all the concerned teams (involving members from product team, back-end team, front-end team, marketing team and design team). It is always essential to educate other team members, involve them in design, build consensus and increase sensitivity to usability issues.

The product specifications handed over by the product team was very helpful in building the overall design. The specs explicitly described each entity, its scope and how the information was supposed to be gathered. F2F interviews and surveys were carried out with the targeted merchants to understand the usage and their expectations of the product.

After contemplation of results obtained from internal as well as external research, I’d begun to map the path a user will take on a particular kind of visit. Repeated the same for other kinds of visits. Contemplated if the journey could be made easier or dumb friendly.

After contemplating user flow, I pinned plausible breakpoints due to incompetent UX or UI. I continuously ideated and tested designs across various teams internally.

(Please note, the product is yet to be launched. Due to NDA, I cannot share the detailed research reports here.)

Post user mapping, I developed the flow and deliverables. Screens were iterated and continuous feedbacks were received by team members. Meanwhile usability testing and A/B testing were done on design issues which needed to be designed without biases. Everyone was involved actively in all the decision-making and repetitive feedbacks were received and given on all the design issues.

For instance, an entity as basic as form had multiple iterations spanning across full four weeks (including the testing). Multiple iterations were proposed for every problem statement, and were subjected to multiple feedbacks and reviews.

(Please note, the product is yet to be launched. Due to NDA, I cannot share the mockups here.)

Design team and environment

For us, collaborative craft is of utmost importance; not control. We do not have a single design leader, rather we create a leader in every individual. One can think of Razorpay as a company where everyone is a leader. To achieve this, we have been maintaining transparent communication channels within and across all teams. So far, we have not regretted our choice of making Razorpay a decentralised organisation.- Arun Chetty

Razorpay fosters one of the best office culture across the country. I’d spent summers working and bonding with some very talented designers. For this experience, I’d like to thank everyone on the team. Special thanks to Chetty for his guidance throughout the internship.

Razorpay Design Team (From left: Shivansh Singh, Nikhil Chandrashekhar, Ankeet Kavaiya, Radhika Gemawat, Rahul Chandh, Saurabh Soni, Chetty Arun)

Thanks for reading!