Overview / Context
For more than a decade across India and South East Asia, the technology ecosystem has been dominated by something called the “Super-App” this includes platforms such as WeChat, GoJek, and Grab. By recent definition, it is …
“A mobile or web app that can provide multiple services including payment, financial transaction processing, self-contained commerce and communication platform that embraces many aspects of personal and commercial life.”
This idea was particularly on the rise in India and I helped the TATA Group build a Super App called TATA Neu at its HQ in Fort, Mumbai as the Design Lead.
The Anatomy of a SuperApp
Grab (South East Asia) and GoJek (Indonesia)
Super Apps combine entire offerings into one unified system creating solutions for the daily life issues while advertising sale and discounts. For the western consumer this may seem overwhelming and confusing to see so many items on the home-screen, but for SuperApps its about UX Problem Solving first (and beauty second). The userbase is used to the clutter and they have a mode in which they parse through and explore apps fast to find what’s useful to them.
Wireframes
I’ve design directed TATA Neu so that as much clutter should be removed from the home-screen (clutter is very common amongst the Super-App landscape). Payment mechanism up-top, and all of the sections categorized hierarchically based on user data from each business vertical fine-tuned to each user persona. The app auto-rotates sections using ML adapting to the specific needs of the user over time.
Example Use-Cases for a “Super-App“
Let’s take for example a simple task like Bill Payment. Normally these are fulfilled by the company’s own web platform or a brick-and-mortar store location, but all have varying levels of support & reliability. If your electric company’s website is down, you’ll have to physically go get to the local agent before your electricity is shut off for missing payment. This obviously becomes very tedious, here’s a flow in Tata Neu which solves that problem:
The app syncs with local electric companies and automatically fetches your bill to help complete the payment in a few clicks. Functions like this and other payment mechanisms are the initial driver towards app downloads in the beginning stages of super apps in South Asian countries, these conveniences tend to build strong user bases.
What Sets TATA Neu Apart
Moving the internal advertising into a dedicated story mode on top so the user can clearly see the new deals and announcements with out it being in the way of their user flow and content was key in this design, the app was designed to provide more dynamic and interesting things that users want to see among the tasks in their daily rituals — not just typical discounts and deals on individual products, but story driven content that provides full context on the products.
Full Prototype