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WhatsApp Business

On the weekend of 7-8th of November 2020, our team had the pleasure and thrill to participate in GrowthSchool Hackathon aka Jugaad-a-thon in India which was held virtually due to the pandemic.

Our project is in aids of making WhatsApp Business as a holistic experience to sell products online.

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This research report is a team effort of Srishti, Sanesh, Sukanya, Sreenivas & Simran.

About the brand

WhatsApp is a mobile application that does not need an introduction. But for those who are not aware of this application; it is used by more than 2 billion people in over 180 countries to stay in touch with friends and family, anytime and anywhere. WhatsApp is free and offers simple, secure, reliable messaging and calling, available on phones all over the world.

Problem Statement

WhatsApp has noticed that a lot of people in India are using it to run their businesses. However, the current business experience is not ideal, so people use a lot of other apps (for product showcase, payment etc.) to help run their business. WhatsApp wants to make it a holistic experience for businesses to sell products online. Design the WhatsApp for the business experience to make it seamless.

Choosing the Problem Statement 

Out of the 5 problem statements that were given to us, we had to unanimously arrive at one single problem statement that we would use to carry out our research. 

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Icebreaker Session with the Team:

Since we were all new to each other the first step was to break the ice and just get to know each other more and discover each one's strengths so we could leverage them in the hackathon. 

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Brainstorm Session:

Each of us chimed in with our thoughts and ideas based on knowledge of that particular domain.

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Pros and Cons List:  

The classic technique of eliminating ideas is to make a pros and cons list, which we did. This helped us to eliminate the bottom 3 options and focus on the top 2.

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Desk Research & Combined Results:

We carried out individual desk researches on the two shortlisted topics. One was in the travel segment (MakeMyTrip) and the other was the communication and business segment (WhatsApp Business). 

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Conducted a Poll:

In order to come to a conclusion, we decided to conduct an online poll. As you can see the majority went with the WhatsApp Statement. 

Rationale For Our Choice

There were a couple of reasons why most of us voted for the WhatsApp Statement, they were as below 

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Common Topic:

Travel is a very common and researched topic, while, our team was looking for something more challenging 

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Competitive Edge:

We assumed most teams would not choose this topic because of much lesser research done on this, and that motivated us even more as this would give us a competitive edge

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Market Gap:  

WhatsApp is still widely used as a chat app and there is a huge market gap that we intend on finding solutions for 

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Relatable Topic:

WhatsApp is used by a wide age group range because it is so easy to use and navigate for anyone. This, in turn, makes it a very relatable topic for us to choose and work on.

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Users' Expectations:

Users have the very least expectations from the app since it is primarily a chatting app which they excel at and another major reason for their expectations being low is because it is a free app. Therefore, this gives us an empty canvas to paint around and implement the solutions.

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Large Market Audience:

India is WhatsApp's biggest market, with 200 million users (Cited below). This definitely would give us leverage in finding users for our primary research

Research Timeline

Hackathons are all about performing under pressure and within the given deadlines. It was very important for us to make a timeline that would help us track our progress at every stage.

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As you can view below, we first chalked down all the steps that we planned on doing at the start of the research. After which we allocated time durations to each one. Given the time constraints, we had to modify the Design Process to our own needs.

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  • We chose to do the assumption-based Journey Mapping which we intended to validate with our primary research. This would help us identify the gaps between the 'current state' and 'ideal state' of the business. We wanted to use this information and find opportunities.

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  • Another thing in this process that is different from usual researches is the time allocated for secondary research. 1.5 hours is very little to carry out desk research usually, however, we wanted to give lesser preference to this step because we knew that the users were easily reachable and accessible for us to gather their insights.

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  • Empathy Mapping is missing from our version of the Design Process, the reason being, that we already got a gist from the Journey Mapping that we plotted.

Roles Allocation

We initially allocated work in the manner given below. However, after the first day of the first day, we realised it was not working out for us. We then changed the roles according to our strengths and speed and divided the work properly rather than all of us doing all tasks together, 

The second time the roles were allocated keeping in mind our strengths and work experience. Simran & Srishti were allocated the research and documentation part given their educational learnings of making reports and dissertations. On the other hand, Sukanya has a great hand at the tools and that can really come in handy to beautify our work and add that extra edge. Along with that, she has also been allocated the tasks with Sanesh and Sreenivas on wire-framing and video making, since they all have the required skills and are experts in their field.

Team Management

  • We connected on WhatsApp for the ease of communication

  • We kept digressing on from the topic while brainstorming, had to keep a check on that

  • We were already jotting down points on a shared document so that everyone could refer to it

  • We took short breaks so that we don't burn out during the entire process

  • We had few disagreements and arguments, but we made sure to listen to everyone's opinions and thoughts and not let the clash of perspectives cloud our judgment.

Journey Mapping

One of the primary reasons to choose WhatsApp For Business as our problem statement was that we saw a good opportunity to find gaps in the current features being offered in WhatsApp Business App.

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To find those gaps and opportunities we began our design process with a pseudo version of a journey map of our own.

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Once we found certain gaps and opportunities, we planned to include them as a part of our validation after the desk and the primary research so that the insights we got from user interviews can be mapped to the gaps and opportunities we assumed in our journey maps.

Rationale For Our Choice

  • To drive the design process in a user-oriented manner.

  • Derive the gap between the current features and opportunities (to be used as data points in the Ideation stage)

  • Understand the pain points of the user

  • It would help us in desk research (search for current features and user grievances to build up our opportunity base)

Secondary Research

Some of the other secondary research was done in almost every design process until we reached the ideate part. We used quick desk research for deciding upon our problem statement as well.

We found a good scope of increasing the user experience based on the data we collected from secondary research.

  • Payment option not directly available (Although UPI has been just recently announced)

  • Managing orders is hard

  • Difficult to reach a wide audience

  • Some Business and customer bases already making use of the app on an everyday basis

Defining Users & Primary Research 

To get good insights from at least two kinds of business users, we divided our target users into two broad categories-

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a) Small Sized Business Owners

b) Medium Sized Business Owners

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Defining a user involved looking up to our desk research to decide upon users who could be interviewed easily in a short span of time and yet be insightful.

Rationale For Our Choice

  • To understand the two sides of the story, these two groups would give great insights into average-sized businesses and their needs.

  • These users are easily approachable in our contacts or recent purchases on WhatsApp.

  • Small businesses have recently been looking for apps like these to grow their business in Pandemic hit.

  • Great insights could be discovered from homegrown businesses which are trending in the Indian market these days #MakeInIndia.

User Interviews

The next step was to find our users and do a quick call keeping the time constraints in mind. We had assumed we will easily find users because of the large audience that uses WhatsApp and that is exactly how it went for us. After finding the opportunities in the journey map, we had a base ready to curate our questionnaire. We included follow up questions and avoided closed-ended questions to get the maximum insights from users. 

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Three of us divided the interviews amongst ourselves and conducted 2 interviews each. Since we were closely related to people who already conducted their business on WhatsApp, the interview flew smoothly. We covered both, product as well as the service industry. We all collected some great insights and went ahead and documented it and shared it with the entire team.

User Personas

We decided on two major User Personas based on our interviews and users defined above. We went ahead and created personas with a list of traits they have and essential paint points such users might be facing.

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a) Small-Sized ( HomeGrown )

b) Medium Sized ( Startup Business)

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These two categories were able to give us insights into the pain points of such users.

Rationale for Choice of our User Persona

  • We got really good insights from small businesses like jewellery selling on WhatsApp and a home baker who sells cakes, brownies and assorted chocolates

  • We got insights from people who are in progress to open their own startup of product lines like sneakers and a cafe too

  • We restricted to two personas as getting in touch with large businesses was tough in 48 hours

  • Pain points could be empathized with easily for small businesses flourishing in our surroundings itself

User Persona 1

User Persona 2

User Pain Points 

With the help of user interviews and user personas, we took it one step ahead and empathised with our users and identified their pain points. Most of them were covered in the user personas, however, we wanted to just jot all of them in one place so that it becomes easy to ideate solutions. 

Not Enough Reach & Exposure:

The users are not satisfied as they cannot reach new users on WhatsApp until they have their contact details. Another point was that WhatsApp also limits business' messages and reach to avoid any spam and fraud. However, this has not worked in the favour of the users. 

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Difficult to keep track of Client Communication:

WhatsApp is a great chatting tool, but not so great when it comes to organisation and structure. The users keep facing problems of the data being missed or lost because of storage issues or human errors. Due to this, medium-sized businesses hesitate to shift their client database on WhatsApp even though it's free of cost.

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Have to maintain a lot of side documents (Inventory, Budget, Scanning Documents):  

In order to use WhatsApp as a business tool, it needs to offer all or most features that users outsource from other apps. From our interviews, we understood that for businesses to maintain their stock inventory they use one tool, to make and maintain budgets they use another tool and even to scan documents they need to download another tool. That leaves WhatsApp to merely be a chatting tool that connects businesses to their users. 

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Miss important messages due to mixing up of chats:

Users also face problems when their personal messages get mixed up with their business messages and two different apps for WhatsApp does not work if they use a single number.

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Talking about missing important details even the small-scale business owner we interviewed shed a light on how she has had a tough time with managing her long calls with her users and does not remember the important details. This was her major pain point.

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Trust issues to buy products or use services:

One main ingredient to online sales is user trust. Users are very hesitant to shop or use services from businesses that function from WhatsApp, most of them also ask for advance payments and that adds to the anxiety for users.

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No reminders for pending messages/ payments:

Even though WhatsApp has tried to address this common user problem through its labels feature, most users have still not used it. The reason they gave was the non-user-friendly approach of the features, so it continues to be users' pain point.

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Managing orders and payments:

Online businesses core function is their order and payment procedures, and WhatsApp is a work in progress for these features, so as of now, the users are not that satisfied and do not even consider WhatsApp to be a business tool.

Ideation Session

We have user insights and pain points mentioned above to have sufficient data for our major activity i.e. Brainstorming Ideate Session.

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We made a note of the pain points of each persona and listed the common ones and the essential requirements the user persona portrays. We identified ideas that might solve those pain points and work as potential solutions. We all combined our ideas and the same is below.

Shortlisting Ideas From Brainstorming Activities

Shortlisting ideas can create disputes in the group as everyone is entitled to have an opinion and everyone thinks theirs' is the most appropriate one. The same happened with our group as well, we had initially thought of carrying out the 'Top 3 and Bottom 3 Technique', however, we failed to come to a middle ground. We then thought of another creative technique that is also used by organisations i.e 'NUF Test' - New, Useful & Feasible.

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As the name suggests, we went ahead and discussed the ideas again and started to score the ideas in terms of their newness, usefulness and feasibility. With the help of this technique, all of us unknowingly became detached from our opinions and tried to score them according to these parameters. This also gave us a 3-dimension perspective to choosing the most appropriate solutions for the users.

We then went ahead and totalled up the scores and planned to go ahead for the wire-framing stage for the top 5 solutions.

User Personas

  • Inventory Management and Sales Reporting

  • Enhancing online shopping experience on WhatsApp

  • Scan Supporting Documents ( Transaction, Invoices, Customised Sketches such as a personalised cake )

  • Sharing real-life look-alike business cards

  • Call Recording with Clients

Sketch and Low-Fidelity Wire Frames

After the Ideate activity, we had a bunch of ideas as mentioned above to turn into low fidelity wireframes or sketches.

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We went ahead and scribbled a few wireframes and looked at their respective pros and cons to come down to one wireframe to prototype.

High-Fidelity Wire Frames

High-Fidelity Wire Frames

We created high fidelity wireframes of the features/solutions we decided upon in the ideate and wireframing stages in order to get more real-time user experiences. 

Idea 1: Inventory Management and Sales Reporting

Sketch

Version 1

Version 2

Rationale For Choosing Version 2

  • We didn't want to clutter the details and keep the minimum information. We released that too much information was present in version 1 so we applied the Minimalist Design Principle and refine our sketch.

  • Page Label added at the top for better understanding in version 2.

Low Fidelity Wireframes

High Fidelity Screens

We tried to put our maximum effort into doing the essential feature - Inventory Management because it was a one-stop-shop solution to multiple problems.

Inventory Management & Sales Reporting

  • Add products to the business catalogue taking along the purchase price and stock count along with the product details.

  • Manage, track and analyze product sales base.

  • The existing two features were share and forward which is in a way a redundant feature, so we replaced forward with a download feature so that users can retain the copy of the report or maybe use it for analysis to grow business

  • One major reason for choosing these features was their high NUF Test values

  • Pain points of the users were to maintain the record of the stocks and finances on various apps and tools or even manually, hence, we prioritised this solution

Idea 2: Scan Supporting Documents (Transaction, Invoices, Customised Sketches such as a personalised cake)

Sketch

Version 1

Version 2

High Fidelity Screens

Scanner 

  • We made changes in version 2 based on user behaviour/pattern

  • A laymen user uses a camera to click pics and send over WhatsApp

  • Sketches, as we have shared here, are not so great presenting pieces as the camera encounter light and shadow issues

  • To cater to these needs and eliminate the need to shift of 3rd party apps, we included the scanning feature in the app itself.

  • To scan physical documents

  • To convert physical documents into digital documents

  • Short-link which business uses for their profiles to send over clients

  • For ease of communication, we included a QR code scanner to do the job

Idea 3: Call Recorder

Sketch

Final Version

High Fidelity Screens

Call Recorder

  • One major pain point in primary research was to have a call record feature so that the same can be used as a reference to cater to client needs and customization.

  • Privacy of the customer has been taken care of along with the feature.

  • A request will be generated by the user and the customer has the privilege to decline or accept the request.

  • This feature is similar to a video calling request taking into consideration error heuristics to decline the request initiated by mistake.

  • We have also added a stop button to give the user the ability to stop the recording anytime he wishes to do so.

  • This feature removes the dependent calling feature which the user otherwise would have made use of to record the owner-client conversation.

Idea 4: Sharing real-life look-alike Business Cards

Sketch

Final Version

High Fidelity Screens

Business Card

  • Business users use a feature called Short Link to share their profiles over chat

  • Currently, the user experience of sharing this link is lengthy and confusing

  • We added the short link feature in the attachments to reduce the number of clicks to reach the feature and make the process faster

  • We also added an option to give users a look and feel of the real physical business card by just uploading a picture which is shared along with the link

Research Limitations

  • We realised that we were better at proposing ideas than actually implementing it. Due to the time constraint, we had to give up on some ideas which were taking time to implement

  • We only had the time to get the perspective of the business owners using the app through primary research and not the customers, so we had to make assumptions for that.

  • We did not have a choice of selecting our group members, so we could not choose the experts in each field that is required to carry out a research

Lessons Learnt

  • There were many things new to us, and the non-textbook approach proved to serve best in those situations

  • Initially, we were working on each step of the process together, but time taught that "divide and conquer" is what we need to do

  • The work need not be perfect and fancy, imperfect is actually perfect, as long as the thoughts and ideas are conveyed properly

  • When different people with different opinions and perspectives come together, disagreements and clashes are bound to happen. We should take them positively and not let them cloud our judgements

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