What My Mother’s Experience with Meesho Reveals About Product Design

I come from a Tier 2 city, and I have grown up around people who are not particularly comfortable with technology. For many people around me, a phone is still mostly for calls and WhatsApp. My mother is one of them.

She is 50, a B.Com graduate, understands some English but is not fluent in it, and is otherwise a very bold and independent woman. For a long time, her phone was mostly a communication device. She would call people, chat on WhatsApp and upload statuses.

She has become very good at using WhatsApp, but there is an interesting difference between being good at using something and being comfortable with technology itself.

She has learnt WhatsApp through repetition.

She knows where to tap because she has done it hundreds of times. She knows how to put up a status because she has done it enough times to remember the steps. But if WhatsApp changes something in its interface, she immediately gets confused.

I think of her as a skill-based user. She can perform a task very well once she has learnt the steps, but that does not necessarily mean she understands the system well enough to adapt when those steps change.

I recently taught her how to use UPI. She uses PhonePe now, but she mostly follows a process she has memorised. Open the app, select the option, enter the details, enter the PIN.

She knows how to do it, but she is still not completely confident about exploring it on her own.

This was not limited to UPI.

I had downloaded almost every shopping and quick commerce app I could think of on her phone. Amazon, Myntra, Flipkart, Meesho, Blinkit and a few others. I taught her how to use them too.

It did not really work.

She would still ask me to order things for her. Even today, she asks me to book rides for her.

Then, sometime later, I went home and found out that my mother had been ordering things from Meesho on her own.

And not just ordering.

She was browsing products, placing orders, returning things and even ordering things for some of her friends.

I was genuinely surprised.

I had never taught her how to use Meesho.

She had figured it out herself.

That made me curious about what Meesho was doing differently.

My mother is not suddenly more technologically literate. She still gets confused by changes in apps she already knows. She still prefers asking me to book a cab. She still uses her phone primarily for communication.

But she can spend a considerable amount of time on Meesho, moving from one product to another, looking at things, checking options, ordering something and returning it if she does not like it.

There is something about the way Meesho fits into her behaviour.

And I think this has a lot to do with who Meesho is actually designing for.

When we think about an e-commerce user, it is easy to imagine someone who knows how shopping apps work. Someone who understands filters, sorting, categories, product specifications, reviews, payment flows and everything else that comes with online shopping.

But that is not necessarily the person Meesho is trying to serve.

For many of its users, shopping online can be less about knowing how an e-commerce platform works and more about discovering things.

My mother does not open Meesho with a very specific product in mind every time.

Sometimes she is just looking.

She scrolls.

She sees something interesting.

She opens it.

She looks at other options.

She sends it to someone.

She comes back to it.

She orders it.

This behaviour is very different from how I use Amazon.

If I open Amazon, I usually know what I want. I search for it, compare a few options and buy it.

Meesho feels much closer to window shopping.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons my mother became comfortable with it.

She does not need to understand the entire system before she can use it. She can simply start browsing.

The same thing happens with the women around me. I have noticed many of them casually using Meesho to look at clothes, jewellery, home products and other things. Some of them would not describe themselves as people who are good with technology.

Yet they know how to use Meesho.

That distinction is interesting.

A skill-based user can learn a particular flow through repetition. A knowledge-based user can understand the logic of a system and adapt when something changes.

My mother is largely the former.

But Meesho seems to work particularly well for that kind of user because the app does not demand that she understand the entire system before she can participate in it.

She can learn as she goes.

And once she has figured out the basic interaction, she can keep exploring.

There is also something else that I find interesting about Meesho.

A lot of people, especially designers, have strong opinions about its interface. The visual language can feel busy. There is a lot happening on the screen. There are things that I would definitely question as a product designer.

For example, I have noticed product cards showing a number of reviews, only to open the product and find that there are no reviews there. There are small inconsistencies like this that can make the experience confusing or unreliable.

But when I look at my mother using the app, I realise that I am looking at it from a very different position than she is.

I know how e-commerce products are structured.

I know what filters are supposed to do. I know what information I should look for before buying something. I understand most of the language used by these products.

My mother does not.

Yet she has found her own way of using Meesho.

And that is what interests me about the product.

Meesho does not seem to be trying to turn its users into expert online shoppers.

It has built itself around the way many of them already behave.

They browse. They discover. They share things with friends and family. They ask each other about products. They order things that catch their attention.

My mother even orders things for her friends now.

She has become the person other people ask when they want something from Meesho.

That is quite a shift from someone who once needed me to order things for her.

I think there is something worth studying here, especially as designers.

When we design products, we often start with an idea of what the user should be able to do.

But sometimes the more useful question is: what does the user already know how to do, and how can the product build around that?

My mother did not become more tech-savvy because of Meesho.

Meesho found a way to become familiar to her.