Background

Identity is prismatic. Every app you love has a little bit of your personality on it and that's how you build a "relationship" with it. It's not just Instagram, Spotify, Twitter. It's 'your' Instagram, 'your' Spotify, 'your' Twitter. Each app knows something about you and that's what makes it yours.

When you look at Groww, specifically Groww Pay, it's the same for every user. How could we bring a more personal touch to a payments product? There's three things: you, your friends and your habits.

To start with, we added a way for users to add their profile pictures on the platform. This probably should've been done years ago, but better late than never. Next? QR codes.

QR codes are the single biggest thing running small businesses in India, right now. Paying for your cab? Scan the QR on the back. Buying yourself coffee? Scan the QR. Every business has it on their counter. It's fast, reliable and convenient. General lingo for it is ‘Scan GPay' or ‘PhonePe QR'. We felt it was an opportunity to allow users to have their own QR, instead of the app's.

First draft

Initially, one of my ideas was letting people draw on their QR code. They could write, draw, sign, anything to make it their own. A way to showcase personality. Themes were another aspect, which I thought could be a fun element.

Research

Before getting started, I paired up with our UX researcher, Vipul, to evaluate the value proposition and user response to a customisable QR code feature. We wanted to know:

• Which user segments would be interested in customising their QR codes
• What kind of users are they? What is their demographic, psychographic profile?
• How do they associate custom QR codes with their identity?

We hypothesised that frequent QR code users would find the feature interesting while infrequent or non-users would find it appealing due to its uniqueness and could potentially increase their activity on Groww Pay.

We structured the research around three cohorts: regular QR users, sporadic QR users and users who only used UPI IDs. For each of these cohort members, we also wanted to know their age group, their exposure to similar customisation experiences and occupation.

To guage interest, we conducted a simple survey. It included an image with 5 examples of customised QRs and just asked one thing: Would they be interested? Y/N. This would help us understand how many users are curious to know more.

To learn more about their comprehension and usage, we conducted short interviews with users who responded on the survey. We made sure we selected users from all three cohorts evenly. During the interview, we asked questions around:

• Why do they prefer QR over UPI ID?
• Comprehension and recall of the concept (from the survey) - Were they able to understand the proposition correctly?
• Why did they want to know more?
• What part of the custom QR did they find interesting?
• What part of the custom QR excites them the least?
• Why and how will they use it?

To understand association with identity and to maximise desirability we triangulated what users liked with existing concepts and asked users to describe their own QR using existing elements (themes, scribble, photo).

Themes

Initially, I tried to draw inspiration from highly customised objects - like mech keyboards. I'm an enthusiast and I've seen the extents people go to customise these things. Some other direction were materials and festivals.

I then landed on album artworks and colour picked from a few of my favourites. To see how people would respond, I dropped all of them on a FigJam and let some of my teammates vote on their favourites.

You'll also notice there's some emojis in the background. Instead of letting people draw anything like I had thought initially, I gave them options to choose from. We made some custom ones as well for the release like: chai cups, peacock and the Chandrayaan-3 to celebrate the launch.

Experience

The experience itself also had to be designed. The first draft had a lot more "setup wizard" feeling than we wanted. I tried to move towards a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) approach. A great example of this is Instagram Stories.

Discovery

Before this project, a user's QR code was accessible only via an option 2 layers deep inside the tab. Discovery was unreasonably poor and needed to be addressed urgently when you consider how high of a use case they are for small-businesses. Small shops in India run purely on UPI QR codes. A hack a lot of cab and auto drivers do is save their QR code as a wallaper on their phone. The hack makes their QR super accessible.

I explored ways to make the QR code more accessible in the app and also outside it.

Inspiration & explorations