To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Eros.
Project Scope: 10 weeks
Project Type: Eros International
Activities: UX Research, UI Design, Usability Testing
Tools: Paper, Pencil, Sketch, Invision, Illustrator,
My Role
I played the role of User Experience designer for ‘Eros now’ creating experiences across Android, iOS, iPad, Desktop, Apple TV, Android TV.
I led efforts to evolve the design, review and deliver detailed design specs to engineers, conduct and own user research by addressing customer pain points related to the browse and discovery experience and communicate insights and reports to higher management.
Continuous efforts were made in the role of the designer towards evolving entertainment service and empathizing customers with “browse and discovery”.
Till July 2016 the strategic steps were taken to align music experience (core feature application) and on-boarding experience with other features of application like payment, TV linking, Chromecast, Podcast, etc.
1. Understanding Product
Understanding and keen observation of product functionalities in current scenario gives first hand experience of usability & its ease of accessibility.
2. Customer Insights & Ideation
I partnered with project manager, content team & one other lead designer to uncover insights and translate concepts into features that address customer behaviours and motivations followed with contextual inquiry and surveys.
3. Planning & Scope Definition
Next step towards successful design is collaborative planning, which was carried out with the product project manager. It evangelized customer goals and balanced the business goals. Firm understanding of the goals gave me the confidence to prioritise and negotiate the features for launch.
4. Oversight & Coordination
The contextual designing where product features have to be translated for each of the different technological platforms requires team work with various platform designers and project managers.
5. Design Execution & Validation
The design tools like customer journey, wireframes, prototypes along with design specifications helped me to achieve user experience goal on world wide web as well as on mobile app.
6. Leadership
Initiating and leading whole design process along with business objectives, gained lot of support from seniors, executives and other stakeholders.
THE START
Reviewing Eros Music
After analyzing and reviewing apps across platforms, we have prioritized our design tasks. Our first task was to redesign the experience of the Music feature as it has not been used by users.
Eros Music is a streaming music service available to all members at no additional cost to their membership.
Premium members will get personalized content with all HD movies subscription and download from a catalog, for now, we are not adding download feature for music.
Started with the basic design process, Competitive analysis, Contextual inquiry, Surveys followed by the analytics.
Understanding the pain points
• According to analytics, very few people were using this feature on the website, people generally browse, to watch movies, it’s obvious that Eros International is known for movie production.
• The inappropriate page layout was making important things unnoticeable and hence it was difficult for customers to retain information.
• Lack of categorization of videos and audios was seen as an obstacle to user experience.
• Hierarchy is not defined in entire music, the user doesn’t know where to start and where to go.
THE SOLUTION
Music V2.0
Data from analytics and user interviews suggested that initial music experience (music v1) needed an upgrade. We learned from the competition, conducted user research and upgraded the music experience that was more engaging and localised to Indian music lovers. After releasing it 200% increase in time spent on music was registered.
Mobile version
Web version
Lets understand the story or logic of the design
THE SERVICE
Introducing Eros Music
The world is changing in tandem with technology, so the music industry. Since 2012 the demand for digital music has gone down and on-demand, real-time music streaming services have taken over.
Eros has understood the pulse of time and realigned its business strategy with the changing pattern of music consumption.
The challenge was to evolve with customers and enter in highly competitive on-demand streaming music segment, primarily catering Indians across the world.
Problems were identified in the existing system and explored the need for categorization, meta-tagging of songs and movies. In lack of proper tagging and cataloging, user experiences very limited and relatively old versions of music and movies.
One of the objectives of my design process was to give different identities to the music page and thereby increase discoverability. It makes things discoverable and a strong relationship with customers can be expected.
THE APPROACH
Good Fast Cheap
In favor of speed to market, we were tasked to design and build Eros Music within the existing Design and Music Library architecture. The move was perceived to be advantageous and the riskiest.
The assumption was simple—millions of customers visit Eros every day.
Extend the acquire, play, manage the conceptual model that customers were familiar with and leverage the existing infrastructure to get to market sooner and cheaper.
This early architectural decision had a major impact on the quality of the customer experience we could both create and reconcile.
“The combination of a fixed launch date and aggressive scope created an intense environment with many coordination and time challenges.”
Working backward from the fixed launch date, meant that design was subsumed into an engineering-driven process. Sign-off milestones were driven by engineering estimates and time to create the right design was the time left over. The combination of a fixed launch date and aggressive scope created an intense environment with many coordination and time challenges.
We conducted customer and market research to drive our planning phase.
These are the key insights that defined the launch version of the product:
THE DISCOVERY
Customer Insights
We conducted customer and market research to drive our planning phase. These are the key insights that defined the launch version of the product:
1. Lean‐back & Lean‐forward
The primary segments are customers that listen to spoon-fed music and customers that actively control what they listen to.
But there was a need to explore one step ahead..
2. Playlists Go With Activities
Customers listen to playlists to complement a mood or an activity such as relaxing, working-out, cleaning or reading.
3. Songs Remain The Same
Customers only listen to 19% of their own music library which consists mostly of catalogue songs, not albums.
4. More Organised
There are million of songs in our library that remains undiscovered, so Songs as playlist and genre were arranged along with content team and engineers for tagging playlist.
5. Show me You Know Me
It was clear in my strategy that customers expect Eros to know them and serve personalised music recommendations.
To do this it was important to track user activities based on time and location.
THE VISION
One Million Songs, Free For You
Our vision for Eros Music was to be the best value music service for Eros customers, not a me‐too on‐demand streaming service.
We did not want to offer an exhaustive catalog of songs, rather wanted to focus on helping customers discover music they’ll love, from a selection of music they will actually listen to.
Our customers expect and trust us to know them. We envisioned the future of the music service to be deeply personalised to customers' music tastes but that's for premium users.
Key Elements for Design & Personalisation
1. Personas
2. Logical catagorisation
We conducted a large-scale survey to understand how casual music listeners identify with and select different types of playlists. We learned that:
1. Genre and mood were the most important influencers when choosing music to listen to. The activity was also reported.
2. The genre was used as a way to find music that matches a mood or to exclude certain types of music.
3. There was a high degree of overlap in the way customers think about moods and genres.
Based on these insights, I designed the Playlist browse experience as a single filter list. This was designed to reduce upfront decision-making; reduce cognitive load recalling between genre and mood, and carry a stronger information scent to invite customers to use it.
Genres (Before)
Moods & Themes
I wanted heading should be more easy & connected to the users, also we realise that many people understand “Genre” as name and we have content more than just genres.. so we have changed to “Moods & themes”
3. What come first? & what is missing?
I conducted interviews with different kinds of users ( Drivers, Maids, Cooks, Professionals, Homemakers ) which not only focuses on music but the overall experience.
Different from league we use reoriented interviews and card sorting techniques.
“Why not play a game with the users?” that’s what we made.
"Gamification is finding the way to incent the behaviors that you want your team to have.”
– Dave McDermott, Director of Sales Enablement, Kelly Services
4. On boarding experience
Platform Onboarding: The goal of onboarding is to welcome and retain new users. By conducting controlled experiments we constantly try to make the on-boarding simpler and more valuable to the users. To find patterns like user priorities for messaging and backgrounds that resonate most with potential users, we conduct surveys, face to face interviews, hybrid games, and card sort exercises, etc across top geographies (India, US, UK, Canada, etc).
Detailed Design
Communication design
Eros upholds infamously high standards, for the work it produces both externally for customers and internally for team members to consume. This has created a culture that seeks to earn trust through accountability, diving deep into the details, and inviting others to scrutinize work. Heavy documentation is the artifact of such a culture.
The sheer size of this project and structured waterfall approach meant that need to have everything figured out before other teams commit to moving forward with the work. Teams involved in the project need to see it in a tangible document in order to give shape to the technology.
The risk-averse attitude meant the creation of reference documents that can be widely distributed and a high overhead to maintain.
“Prototyping was the most effective way to gain meaningful feedback…”
For each feature phase, I went through cycles of requirements, consensus, approvals, detailed specs, and handoffs.
My process involved sketching and white‐boarding concepts and flows with my PM partner and then translating these directly into hi‐fidelity design comps. Since I was working with many existing design patterns, it was relatively easy to move straight into hi‐fidelity designs.
My next step involved slicing the comps and piecing them together with InVision into a prototype. In the early stages, I focussed only on representing the highest risk areas of the design. Later phases allowed me to focus on micro‐interactions, which I created in Pixate and Keynote.
Prototyping was the most effective way to gain meaningful feedback from the team, the consensus from stakeholders, and approval from senior leadership. I was able to easily distribute these as videos and recycle them for Usability Testing.
REFLECTIONS
What I learnt?
Your Customers(Users) Won’t Forgive You
…because it was quicker and cheaper to build it *that* way
One of Ero’s leadership principles is having a bias‐for‐action. EROS people are proud to insist that product decisions are reversible and spending time doing is better than overanalyzing.
Throughout this project, I observed how bias‐for‐action mutated into a bias‐for‐delivery. Our team disproportionately focused on measuring outputs, rather than learning and measuring outcomes. This inevitably led to a lot of waste, short‐sightedness, and distraction for the team.
We let the question “how quickly can we build it?” define it, more than we let our customers define it. We let the phrase “let’s just get something out there” define quality, more than we let our customers define quality.
If we had asked “are we building the right thing?” as much as we asked “are we going to meet our date?“, we would have launched a more reliable, intuitive, and polished product, sooner.
Viability should have been defined by our customers way before the technology and date already did.
Tools/Workflow
We used common design, data-analytics, and productivity tools for day to day work like sketch-invision-zeplin for design and engineering handoff. Confluence-Jira to write design/product stories. Google Analytics, lookback.io, user-testing, survey monkey, and G-suite for research.
Impact
In less than three years, we scaled up to a multi-platform offering with over 70 million users, with 5 million+ paying subscribers. From research, we identified the demand for certain features on our Android and iOS products long before our competition. We also were awarded the best Apple TV app in India.
App Demo
