Behind Razorpay’s Design Thinking: The USERSS Framework

We break it all down to 6 steps – Understand, Study, Engage, Reconstruct, Ship and Study.

Interestingly enough, their initials form the acronym USERSS (Yeah the final S was necessary. It is one of the pillars Razorpay experience stands on)

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We have defined expectations, output and activities that a designer should do at each stage. Let’s go into each and see how it all figures out.

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Understand and articulate the problem.

Question the need for it, discuss the possible impact, conduct research (wherever possible), go through contextual data, competitors, and talk to the stakeholders – Product, Tech, Ops, Support.

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Solve in n number of ways.

Create concepts in the lowest fidelity, understand tech constraints and implications, gather feedback on it via multiple channels (slack, discussions, etc.), develop a prototype if necessary.

Decide on the concept.

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Engage with tech, product, etc., for feedback.

Discuss the overall vision, the current scope and decide on the solution, which can be a small step towards the final long-term goal.

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Reconstruct the UI flows, detail and prototype it out for engineers to start work.

Design in high fidelity using the design system, take care of the edge cases, the unhappy flows and conduct usability testing on the prototype.

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Ship the final designs out to engineers.

Figure out the release plan and work towards the GTM, work with engineering to set up instrumentation, ensure pixel perfection, cut scope if necessary but have delight as P0 requirement.

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Study user behaviour.

What behaviour was expected, what wasn’t and analyse the reason why it happened anyway. Dig deeper into data to analyse patterns, talk to users to understand what data points towards.

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Certain general things to keep in mind.

Do not take a project for granted because it was brought to you. Ask questions at every stage of the process, the earlier the better. There will be mistakes, just try to make them early.

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When designing in high-fidelity, consider the first time user experience, empty states, nth time UX, and any issues that might come in due to technical constraints.

Also, contribute back to the design system, talk about what doesn’t work there.

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No glove fits all hands. The whole process is modified based on the time, effort, resources available and impact acting as constraints.

Tell us how your process is different from us.

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