(traffic noise)
(vehicles honking)
(Yasmine) Every second,
three more Indians come online for the first time.
That's over 10,000 people every hour.
With smartphones outpacing desktop devices,
India has quickly become a mobile-first nation.
We're here in Bangalore to learn how product creators
are designing for these next billion users.
I sat down with Dipika Kapadia,
the senior director of product management at Ola,
to learn how they're mobilizing this mobile-first nation.
♪ (music) ♪
So tell me, what is Ola? What does Ola do?
So Ola is India's largest ride-sharing company.
And I always say that Ola's product is not our apps,
our product is the cab ride.
It's the way people go from point A to point B.
For many people,
we're their only transportation option to get to their workplace,
and that's my product.
And everything else is a means to an end.
You mentioned about these T2 and T3 towns
and you wanting to build a product that would actually reach them.
What are some of the implications of that
or the considerations you had to take to make that happen?
T2, T3 means people who live in really small towns in India.
So, a population of 5,000 is not a very large town
by Indian standards, right?
So these are people who typically have low-end smartphones
that cost less than maybe even five or six thousand rupees.
They're categorized by having low RAM,
they're categorized by having low memory,
these guys have flaky networks in these towns.
All of that makes it very difficult for them to download
and use a native app that can run to about 100 MBs on iOS
and 60 MBs installed on Android.
It's sort of taking the best of both worlds
and offering it up to all as users.
If I cannot even get these people a reliable way to access our service
on a consistent basis,
they're not going to look to our app as the way to get them a ride every day.
♪ (Indian music) ♪
(Yasmine) The influx of users India is bringing online
opens a door to a lot of potential for product creators.
But there is still significant barriers to overcome.
Thirty-three percent of smartphone users in India run out of storage every day,
and the first thing they do when they need to clear up space
is to delete installed apps.
Ola asked themselves,
how might we design for these next billion users
while being mindful of the unique challenges they face?
To explore the possibilities, Ola built a Progressive Web App.
To me, a Progressive Web App is a bridge between the best
of what the web has to offer and a native app experience.
The fact that a PWA offers me
the SEO benefits that I need for some of my transportation rides,
but also gives me a smooth native in-app like experience.
(Yasmine) Making your app feel fast
is essential to creating a great Progressive Web App experience,
using placeholder UI elements where subtle animation
creates a higher perceived response time.
I asked a lead designer to show me how they achieved this in Ola's app.
(Sankalp) We had local indicators, which is a shimmer.
Let's say you have a pickup location and drop location input,
but then you need some API calls to fetch the pricing.
So in that duration, without blocking the user,
we had shimmers so as to get to show that something is loading
in this specific particular place.
We specifically made sure that we don't use any of the image assets.
All of this was written in code
so that there's no additional request that is required.
In terms of web, we have that leverage that we can push a code fix right away
and it will be live to all of our audience.
So we have taken a rule where we say that,
okay, our mobile web PWA
will be a testing ground for our mobile apps also.
(Yasmine) The human-centered design process
involves testing early and often.
The web makes it easy to iterate quickly.
I asked Dipika
what this new testing ground enabled them to do.
You know, we monitored the conversion final, if you will,
a few weeks after the launch,
and found that there were two precipitous drop-off points
which we immediately worked with our design team to fix.
Needing people to use a CAPTCHA,
which we didn't realize at that point was very American in its context.
It would ask people to click on images that had street signs
or, for example, click on images of tuna.
(laughter)
These are not concepts very well known in India.
So we sort of stepped back and realized
that we actually were using a hammer when we needed a chisel, if you will.
We did not need to show those CAPTCHA to all our users.
We worked with our security team to come up with business logic
so that we were showing it only when it was absolutely needed.
And in doing that this 40% drop that we saw just cleared itself.
♪ (music) ♪
(traffic noise)
By creating a web experience that is reliable, fast, and engaging,
Ola was able to remove a lot of those barriers
and reengage their users.
By removing CAPTCHA and the requirement of email,
Ola moved to a mobile-first approach.
And it actually solved an increase of conversion rate of 30%.
Thoughtful considerations like these help you design for mobile-first nations
and bring in the next billion users.
(traffic noise)
(Yasmine) As product creators, we have a responsibility
to create things that are focused on the human experience,
things that are centered.
♪ (music) ♪
(traffic noise)