SWIGGY
Collectibles
Swiggy is one of the two largest food delivery/quick commerce companies in 🇮🇳 India with over 20 million monthly users, valued at $10 billion
category
Product & partnership led growth
my role
Product Designer
team
1 PM, 1 PD, 8+ engineers + more
What did I do?
Strategy
Research
Copy writing
Motion design
High fidelity prototype
Framework building
Quality control and execution
Helped in marketing strategy
Let's look at the flow first :). It's on loop, you might have to wait a few seconds
Project timeline
A rough visual representation of the whole process from inception till measurement
prologue
India loves cricket
Cricket is more than a sport in India, 2023's men's World cup had more than 500 million views from India. During which we saw some huge spikes in metrics like orders/day, average order values and frequency. Even till 1.5X times the normal days, which is quite astounding at Swiggy's scale where we have 1.5million+ daily food orders.
Cricket is more than a sport in India, 2023's men's World cup had more than 500 million views from India. During which we saw some huge spikes in metrics like orders/day, average order values and frequency. Even till 1.5X times the normal days, which is quite astounding at Swiggy's scale where we have 1.5million+ daily food orders.
Cricket is more than a sport in India, 2023's men's World cup had more than 500 million views from India. During which we saw some huge spikes in metrics like orders/day, average order values and frequency. Even till 1.5X times the normal days, which is quite astounding at Swiggy's scale where we have 1.5million+ daily food orders.
How can product come into picture?
It usually goes like this, there are external events throughout the year, Marketing runs offer campaigns to leverage on those opportunities. However seeing the spike in numbers for 2023's World cup,
Leadership wanted a more aggressive approach to gaining competitive advantage. On a high level, the objectives were:
Competitive advantage
Brand loyalty
Long term user retention
"How can we gamify order placements in Swiggy for IPL (Indian premier league) 2024?"
50+ innovative ideas from the team
Since cricket is such a popular topic, instead ideating in a silo, we decided on sourcing ideas from the whole team of designers, product managers, marketers, engineers. We used a slack channel to collect ideas. Turns out there are so many cricket enthusiasts in the team. Some of the ideas we converged on:
Swiggy sixes
Everytime anyone hits a 6 during an IPL match, Swiggy users will have a window to claim ₹6 as
Swiggy money
Collectibles
Collectibles can vary from virtual Cards to trophies to anything, Users will be rewarded based on their collection
Swiggy mini teams
Replica of a fantasy teams game where users will make teams of 3 and based on the performance of their team in IPL, they will win coupons/Swiggy moey
Swiggy Tambola
Each user will be assigned a system generated Tambola ticket which will have performance parameters of the two teams playing, User will be rewarded the same way players are rewarded in real Tambola
Gamification is a buzzword!
In the name of gamification, often times, products build mindless leaderboards and point systems and hand out rewards and then wonder why the engagement is low. I wanted to follow the core principles so that we make informed decisions. Not to mention the construct should celebrate Cricket and have the context of ongoing IPL (Indian premier league).
User validation
Even though we were quite stoked about all the ideas, it was crucial that the users also felt the same. I along with the Product manager, Winy talked to 20/25 people outside of Swiggy in order to know which of the ideas excite them. Additionally we had run polls in Slack channels. Some of the user interview questions were like these:
Who’s your favourite player?
Who’s your favourite team and why?
How frequently do you watch IPL matches
Understanding complexity
Would you share this among friends?
Excitement level?
Interesting insights
Even though we were quite stoked about all the ideas, it was crucial that the users also felt the same. I along with the Product manager, Winy talked to 20/25 people outside of Swiggy in order to know which of the ideas excite them. Additionally we had run polls in Slack channels
After we have talked to enough people, we had made three buckets. This was crucial for the next part of the strategy.
Personas based on user conversation
IPL Fanatic
Has a favourite player and a favourite team
Watches almost all IPL matches
Emotionally invested
IPL Aware
Has a favourite player and favourite team
Watches IPL matches in the weekends if they have company
Not emotionally invested
IPL Agnostic
Doesn’t have a favourite player or team
Doesn’t watch any matches
Not emotionally invested at all
initial challenges
The great dilemma
Which construct to go forward with? This discussion alone took weeks. For a project which is as huge as this in terms of scale (Pan India), There are multiple stakeholders from different departments involved in the decision making process. It was a huge challenge to bring everyone on the same page. We narrowed down to two options
Swiggy sixes
Everytime anyone hits a 6 during an IPL match, Swiggy users will have a window to claim ₹6 as
Swiggy money
Collectibles
Collectibles can vary from virtual Cards to trophies to anything, Users will be rewarded based on their collection
We team decided on
Collectibles (Trump cards)
Although each of the ideas were worthy enough to be worked on, we decided to go with collectibles as a construct, mainly because the primary target users were pretty excited about this and we believed this will drive active engagement even outside of match hours
deciding factors
User backwardness
Social shareability
Marketability
Cost
Ability to drive New and Dormant users
Personal Biases 🫠
Strategy
After having spent almost a month deciding what to build, we finally moved towards the actual design part, Trump cards is an exceptional idea which no competitor of us have made before. I specifically wanted to take inspiration from the real life Trump cards from the 90s for the mechanism, behaviour and the visuals. Important nuances were:
Marketing strategy
Visual identity
Brand position
Hook rewards
Nomenclature
Guiding philosophy
People love their nostalgic moments, The construct is designed keeping the 90s kid in mind who are now adults. Nostalgia should extend to visuals, copies, communication and marketing. Design principles we followed:
Emotional design
Playfulness
challenges we faced
"It's not looking like Swiggy!?"
I have grown up playing games, GTA, FIFA, Max Payne, NFS. Game design has a special place in my heart. I went full out and made a style-guide which looked immersive and engaging. Two schools of thought here on the design philosophy,
First option being, It should be immersive but should feel like a Game by Swiggy
example: Google pay's gamesSecond option being, it can have certain elements of Swiggy but it can have it's own identity,
example: Apple's fitness app's badges
I have grown up playing games, GTA, FIFA, Max Payne, NFS. Game design has a special place in my heart. I went full out and made a style-guide which looked immersive and engaging. Two schools of thought here on the design philosophy,
First option being, It should be immersive but should feel like a Game by Swiggy
example: Google pay's gamesSecond option being, it can have certain elements of Swiggy but it can have it's own identity,
example: Apple's fitness app's badges
I have grown up playing games, GTA, FIFA, Max Payne, NFS. Game design has a special place in my heart. I went full out and made a style-guide which looked immersive and engaging. Two schools of thought here on the design philosophy,
First option being, It should be immersive but should feel like a Game by Swiggy
example: Google pay's gamesSecond option being, it can have certain elements of Swiggy but it can have it's own identity,
example: Apple's fitness app's badges
Initial exploration: Fully immersive, independent visual language
After we made it more 'Swiggy'
Flows
Play a quiz, or order from Swiggy, collect Trump cards, the win rewards.
This is the high level mechanism of the construct. We faced a lot of challenges while:
Reward structure
Educating the user about ways to win a card
Entry point on Swiggy homepage
Educating the user about shareability
Onboarding flow
Scroll
Milestone achieved
Scroll
15 cards collected
Scroll
Visual direction explorations
Visual design has been a rollercoaster ride for this project. Biggest challenge was to align all the stakeholder onto one direction while everyone is opinionated about cricket.
future prospects
Scalability
I'm a strong advocate for System level thinking and this particular project is made in a modular system which is plug and play for different use-cases
Impact
These are some of the success metrics, where the north star is incremental orders/day. Not sharing the numbers publicly for confidentiality reasons :)
Business metrics
Incremental orders/ day
7, 15, 30 days retention
Total new users activated
Total dormant user reactivated
Gamification metrics
Daily engagement
Reward claim rate
CTR (collective)
qualitative metrics
Social media attention
Word of mouth
Thanks for watching
To view the full case study, please open the link on a desktop :)
Collectibles
SWIGGY
Swiggy is one of the two largest food delivery/quick commerce companies
in 🇮🇳 India with over 20 million monthly users, valued at $10 billion