Paytm.com- User experience going south

One of my favorite Indian applications, Paytm (paytm.com) is fast losing the very reason that made it in my opinion one of the most usable websites in India.

From being a website that was dedicated to recharge and payment of mobile phones, it has ventured into a site that does everything including e commerce but it pays a very heavy price on the usability front.

Losing Focus

Normal users are definitely going to be overwhelmed by the number of choices that are presented in their current navigation whereas the earlier site had just one option. They can easily rectify the information architecture by having one or 2 banners within the home page and leading users to another sub-site like http://buy@paytm.com.

Mobile Recharge: Not focusing on the main goal

After a user fills his details the user is presented with a whole lot of coupon while the button that leads to the payment is on the extreme top right of the screen. Users tend to focus on the same area when they navigate to different screens and thus it is very important that their gaze is not diverted from the interaction that fulfills the main goal.

Some other issues

There are tons of other issues like the placement of the login button on the home page. Due to the proximity to the checkout button, I assumed at first that it was related to the commerce store.

The other major snafu was putting my earlier transactions in a carousel. I had done some recharges for a friend and I wanted to calculate the amount that I recharged for. Earlier the design was a simple table which facilitated scanning and reading easily, but now I have to do a horizontal scroll, remember the numbers and do mental arithmetic.

I just hope that they do a rethink of their experience because I used to really enjoy doing transactions with them whereas it is not a good experience for me anymore.