The goal
My mandate had two parts: lead design for the Amazon.in retail site, and build the Bangalore team that would launch the business and keep innovating for India's specific needs. Success depended on both the real and the perceived shopping experience, across navigation, product discovery, decision-making, checkout, and ongoing engagement, in a market Amazon entered with established competitors already in play.
A mobile-first market with its own rules
India's customers don't shop the way Amazon's US customers do, and designing as if they did would have failed. A large share of shoppers reach the internet only through a phone. Most of those phones are low-cost, low-spec models, and mobile data is expensive and slow. Those constraints shaped every decision we made. The site had to stay light, load quickly, and remain readable on a low-end phone over a slow connection.
The work
We integrated Amazon's core retail features and services and tuned them for the Indian consumer, shipping Amazon Prime, a mobile phone trade-in program, scheduled delivery, Amazon Pay, and Prime Now. A few areas where the design work mattered most:
Mobile Gateway
Indian shoppers browse more than they search, so we optimized the home screen for discovery, with badging for price savings, custom deal banners, and trust messaging that guaranteed product quality.
Search
Benchmarking, usability studies, and customer feedback exposed real gaps against competitors: smaller product images, significantly lower filter discoverability on mobile than on desktop, and far fewer filter options across categories. We redesigned search to close them.
Deals
Indian customers are price-sensitive and come from a shopping culture built around negotiating a good deal. We designed a deals experience to match, with brighter visuals, prominent discounts, and icons that worked for non-English speakers.
Standing up the team and the culture
Beyond the product, I built the design team for Amazon.in and AmazonBusiness.in in Bangalore, and led collaboration across product, engineering, and executive partners on the CX roadmap. For the AmazonBusiness.in launch I managed the UX designers who delivered the sitemaps, wireframes, and flows, and I contributed the naming strategy and leadership presentations.
Keeping the team close to the customer was its own design problem. I planned and facilitated offsite roadmap brainstorms, and I organized Design Mela — a five-day immersion workshop in Bangalore I created to help twenty senior and principal UX designers from the US Search and Shopping team understand the real challenges and differences of the Indian online marketplace. We did home visits with customers, spent time in local shops and markets, and rode along on last-mile deliveries. The team built from what they saw firsthand.
Outcomes
In 2014, 30% of surveyed shoppers said they bought from Amazon; by 2016, 76% did, and Amazon India overtook Flipkart as the preferred online retail destination for metropolitan Indian consumers for the first time.[^1] The team also delivered the India-tuned versions of Prime, Amazon Pay, scheduled delivery, phone trade-in, and Prime Now that made that shift possible.
[^1]: "The Indian Online Retail Market: Amazon Versus Everyone Else." Forrester, 10 July 2017, go.forrester.com.
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