Flipkart fights scroll fatigue with AI-generated product summaries.

Jan 2024

My role

Product Designer — Interactions, User Flows, Prototyping, Data design

Team

Shashwath Chandra (PM), Anwesha (Lead), Jerin Francis (Data), Harinie (UXR)

Duration

Dec 2023 - Jan 2024

Overview

Flipkart fights scroll fatigue with AI-generated product summaries. Ever feel like you're on a product page treasure hunt? Buried ratings, elusive specs – navigating traditional e-commerce pages can be a frustrating odyssey. At Flipkart, we saw user engagement plummet as crucial information got lost in the scroll.

Enter the Gen AI Product Summary Widget! This wasn't an average design project. We harnessed the power of generative AI to create a game-changing, concise and dynamic product overview that surfaces key details instantly.

The backstory

Traditional e-commerce product pages present a wealth of information, including product descriptions, specifications, reviews, and ratings. However, research revealed critical issues:

Information Scattered and Buried: Key details, like ratings and reviews, technical specs for electronics, were often located far down the page.

Limited User Engagement: Scroll depth data indicated significant user drop-off before reaching crucial information sections. Only 30-40% of users accessed reviews, and 40-50% reached product details.

Inconsistent CTA Performance: Click-through rates (CTRs) for product highlights were significantly higher for categories like mobiles and electronics compared to lifestyle and books. Which implies that user seek more information about the product for these categories.

Bridging the Gap

Imagine a bustling marketplace, a salesperson does the job for you. But in an e-commerce app instead of a helpful salesperson, you're faced with a wall of silent product pages. This was the challenge for Flipkart users – sifting through information overload without guidance.

Just like a skilled salesperson, the widget delivers a compelling sales pitch upfront. It leverages AI to dynamically generate a concise overview, highlighting key features and user insights. This initial product summary mimics the salesperson's role of providing a quick introduction, sparking the user's interest and informing their initial decision-making.

AI in action

AI is revolutionizing product summarization. Imagine having a personal assistant condense mountains of text – reviews, descriptions, specs – into a clear, concise overview. This is the power of generative AI in action. Google uses AI for summarising the search results, Agoda and Amazon are summarising customer reviews using AI. This not only empowers users to make quicker decisions but also improves engagement and potentially boosts sales. It's a win-win for both businesses and customers.

The Gen AI Solution

Introducing Gen AI presented a novel approach to address these pain points. Imagine a world where users can grasp key features and user insights at a glance, without the endless scrolling!

Benefits

Improved User Experience: By presenting a quick overview, the widget empowers users to grasp key product details and make informed purchase decisions faster.
Increased Engagement: The readily available summary can incentivize deeper engagement with the product page and potentially boost conversion rates.
Enhanced Information Accessibility: The Gen AI summary ensures essential details are readily visible, regardless of their placement on the page.

We explored various avenues to optimize user experience, including integration in the image gallery and exploring new widgets with multi-touch functionalities. However, ensuring minimal user effort for information consumption remained paramount. Consequently, the final design prioritizes consistency across all sections of the widget, presenting information clearly and uniformly. This streamlined approach empowers users to grasp key product details with minimal cognitive load.

The structure

The title of the section will be USP of the product. The information hierarchy of the widget was defined in such a way that the top section covers the key feature of the product and following sections will have a combination of product details and user generated content (UGC)

The launch

An initial version was launched in March 2024. Before that to understand how Gen AI summary is perceived by the users and how usable is the experience for them a user testing was carried out.

Final design

Version 01

The title and subtitle of version 1 weren't dynamic and kept consistent. This was for establishing the fact that it is an AI widget. The intent was to understand Navigation and Usability, Comprehension, Trust and Value, persuasiveness, and relevance of the summary.

Research report

Product page optimisation

By introducing the new widget the scroll depth of the product page will increase. But this was solved by optimising a few widgets. Since the new widget captures the essence of the widgets like product details, product highlights, R&R etc. these widgets can be optimised.

What’s Next?

The Flipkart Gen AI Product Summary Widget has shown promising results, acting as a quick product overview for our users. However, our commitment to user experience goes beyond the initial launch. Here's what's on the horizon:

Content Refinement: We'll leverage user testing (UT) and A/B testing results to continuously refine the AI-generated summaries, ensuring they align perfectly with user needs.
Design Evolution: Based on UT and AB results, we'll further optimize the widget's design to enhance user interaction and information clarity.
Personalized Summaries: We're collaborating with data scientists to integrate user intent recognition into the AI model. This will allow the widget to personalize summaries based on individual user preferences and browsing behavior, creating an even more tailored shopping experience.
Scaling the Impact: The future holds exciting possibilities for scaling the AI summaries beyond product pages. Imagine getting quick product insights within search results and recommendations – all powered by AI! This will empower users to make informed choices at a glance, streamlining the shopping journey and simplifying decision-making.

This project exemplifies our commitment to continuous improvement and leveraging cutting-edge technology to empower users. We're excited to see how the Gen AI in Flipkart aevolves, shaping the future of online shopping experiences.

Metric

1.1% PP/cart conversion

Expected impact 150 cr GMV