My Role
Product Designer — Product Strategy, User Flows, Prototyping, Visual Design
Team
Manan/ Hitesh/ Vaidehi/ Prakash - PM
Devesh/ Aakash/ Akshay/ Prankul - SDE
Rahul/ Rajvi - SDET
Duration
June 2022 - Present
Overview
In Sept. 2021, a jobs marketplace aimed at increasing the retention of its users to help them reduce their CAC. We designed a full-fledged digital community for professionals: apnaCommunity.
Our focus was on a small target audience, embracing quick MVP development and learning from setbacks. Eventually, we achieved product-market fit for our Community, addressing cost-conscious users’ needs.
This experience taught me the value of strong opinions held loosely in the world of product discovery — this journey in itself was a UX case study of my design evolution.
Backstory - How this all started? 🧐👀
The job-hunting experience is a need-based. Not often do the users come to a job marketplace, until they need one. The marketing burn was not a sustainable option to justify the MAU numbers. What could be done to bring users organically to the app?
Looking at 2 of our big competitors — Naukri & Linkedin, while the former is a public-listed giant & has a legacy system to sustain its CAC, the latter has a large community that has even surpassed its job-marketplace use case.
Thus, combining both - the user need & the business need, the idea of Apna's community came into being.
The plan was to not only build a community to maintain just an active user base but also nurture a digital professional community for job-related learning. The erstwhile COVID waves further acted as an incentive to go online.
We needed early validation & we chose WhatsApp (WA) for it…
Our target audience was students & professionals from 18 to 30 years of age, who were either studying or have graduated & are looking for jobs, upskilling, guidance & industry awareness. So, our 1st challenge was:
Challenge 1: Validating if an online community for professionals from Tier -2+ cities made sense
We divided the task into 3 steps —
Onboarding — Figuring out a tool that could onboard users in larger numbers
Engage- Building a close-knit relationship of professional learning & collaboration
Productize- Once our pilot was successful with many communities having more than 2 WA groups, we decided to productize it.
After exploring several other options online. Partially inspired by the feasibility & initial beginnings of our closest competitor ShareChat, WA seemed easiest.
We began with 4 WA groups for theme-based categorisation — 'Govt. Job Updates', 'Jobs after 12th', 'English Learning' & 'Interview Skills'. We were able to take these 4 groups to 50+ groups with many groups having sub-parts I, II & even III.
However, the chat/ conversation format was not a scalable option. Receiving 100+ new messages every day seemed impossible for users to track. It was time to move to productise it.
The community looked like this when I joined this POD 😓
Soon after I joined the design team performed a comprehensive audit of our product, meticulously mapping out every screen and workflow. Using this audit, I created a visually striking collage that showcased the diverse array of button styles & components within our product, highlighting the fragmented nature of our offering and the resulting confusion for our users.
Everyone agreed - 'Something needs to change!' ✨ & this is how our next challenge came into force:
We divided the task into further 3 steps —
Step 1: Identifying & listing all the UI inconsistencies
Step 2: Implementing our newly built design system
Step 3: Streamline the PDLC & defining the design role for my POD with clear SOPs for development & quality checks
We decided to understand our users before setting up our design guidelines for the re-design
Telephonic calls
Messaging users on WhatsApp or calling them.
Dummy profiles in groups
To understand what were the user talking about
Periodic online meetups
This was done to open-up the users.
We were designing for the masses — the real India, Bharat 🇮🇳 that mostly lives in tier-2+ cities. This gave us an opportunity to deep dive into the digital behaviour of our users. Some of the key insights that we learned:
Finally the Community 1.1 was ready 😍
Contributing to the setting up the Apna Design System, my primary job was to first report any inaccuracies faced in my POD, then give feedbacks, if any on the new design system & then most importantly supervise the implementation of design system in my designs.
Impact:
20-30% Dev efforts were saved 🎉
that were spent on building redundant front-end components
<12%
Customer Support Queries that came regarding the usability of the Community
It was time for new features to come in…😇
Thus, through a gradual series of experimenting with new content types, we launched 5+ new features. We followed our design process very rigourously. Every new feature idea went through a rudimentary validation test before incorporating it.
Polls & Quizzes
Sharing Interview experience
Posts with backgrounds
Reposting posts
Impact:
60% user base of Apna's MAU
North Star Metric i.e. every 6/10 Apna users were active on Community
> 7.2% ~ 7%
Post Creation Index i.e. every 7/ 100 users has created at least 1 post in his lifetime
> 9.8% ~ 10%
Engagement Index reached an all-time high i.e. almost 10% users were engaging with posts
User's Avg. Scroll Depth increased
to 8.9 i.e. every user on an average scrolled past through minimum 8 posts/ session
All was good till we realised we were making a mistake here 😢😭
User connections and referrals were launched to help freshers from tier-2+ cities connect with early-white collars & leverage referrals/ connections.
But, through our periodic user feedback, we got to know that it didn’t prove as beneficial as we thought. Numbers/ metrics showed a positive approach, but the users were not satisfied. On inquiring further we gathered some more insights about our Bharat users:
This is how Community 2.0 came into the picture
We moulded our community based on user feedback & shifted our focus from being a network-first to a skill-first community. We called it ‘Community 2.0'.
It was characterised by a 3 major upgrades:
Inviting professional creators to make their closed groups based on their expertise
Institutionalising upskilling events under ‘Chai pe Charcha’, ‘Apna Xclusives’ etc.
Re-designing connections & allowing referrals only with users who work in companies that are currently hiring.
$120K
Saved from IT Infrastructure, after network use cases were removed
68% M1 User Retention
Enhancing the Job use case, 7/10 users finding a job & using Community will return after 1 month
My Learnings Outcomes
To be honest, initially, I was a little scared. I had no experience designing 0 to 1 products. I was thinking What if something we build doesn’t work? How would we bounce back? Worst, what if it still doesn’t work?
I discussed this with my erstwhile manager Piyush Tyagi. He was aware of my personal priorities and reminded me that this wasn’t very difficult. That was some assurance. I also scraped the internet for videos, articles, etc. that could teach me about community & 0 to 1 product.
