ZEE 5 Entertainment
Zee5 is an online video streaming Over The Top (OTT) platform run by Essel group via its subsidiary Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited. It was launched in India on 14 February 2018 and offers an exhaustive array of content; with 90+ live TV channels and 1.25 lac+ hours of viewing across the various languages making it a complete video destination for OTT viewers.
My Roles
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Research
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UX Design
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Visual Design
Problem Statement
The Client wanted to extend and add News module to its super app (zee5) by bringing in different aspects of being hyper-personalised, local and social and by finding ways to engage the users by recommending browsing content.
Approach
A continuous and iterative process was followed by Think Design team to improve the user experience. Design thinking approach helped us to understand users, define problem, brainstorm possible solutions and later prototype ideas.
Empathise
Define
Ideate
Ideate
Prototype
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Research
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User Interviews
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Personas
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Empathy Map
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Brainstorm sessions
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Affinity Maps
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Paper Sketches
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Wireframes
Research
User Interviews
We created a research plan with an objective to extract meaningful insights by interacting with different user groups.
Sample size: 25 participants
Target audience: 18 yrs - 60 yrs
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User Interviews were conducted to extract insights by probing mechanism. A pre-questionnaire was sent to the research respondents before Interviews to understand their background to make the interaction more meaningful. Open ended questions were framed and asked in following categories
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Getting to know the user
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Family dynamics and devices used
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Knowledge and news consumptions
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Emotions
Affinity mapping
The insights collected from the user interviews were categorized using affinity mapping. The insights gave an idea about what are the preferences of the user, which is most watched news genre, what is the preferred medium, how do users perceive news and their overall emotion regarding news these days.
Listed below are some key points:
Needs​
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Users prefer looking for Top 10/20 trending topics
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Content to be easily discoverable with minimum clicks
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Users would be interested to know highlights of other locations but not necessarily in depth information
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Users expect personalised content as per their choice, and features they are used to accessing through other platforms as well
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Users would want to know history and timeline of major topics which directly play a role in current affairs.
Personas
Based on the information gathered through interviews four personas were created that capture the
challenges of end users
Empathy Map
In order to gain more indepth understanding of the user needs I made an empathy map, It helped to create a shared understanding of user needs and aid in decision making.
Ideate
To come up with solution a brainstorming session was conducted with respective stakeholders where 'How might we questions were asked and participants answered with possible solutions.
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This data was further analysed and possible features were designed.
How might we questions (HMW)
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HMW persue users to consider 'Zee5 news' as a space to keep themselves informed and not just perceive it as an entertainment platform?
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HMW help users feel mentally and physically better, in the time of a global pandemic?
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HMW provide users with a go to source of information that is both trustworthy and productive, so that they feel good after consuming news?
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HMW provide users with minimal and easy to consume information similar to or/ and better than news they are already comfortable with?
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HMW create content that is informal, trendy and humorous.. yet talking about serious matters.. so that users don't feel overwhelmed?
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HMW enable users to easily navigate through Zee5 and find content relevant to their needs and interests?
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HMW help users with authentic pieces of information. So that they take well informed decisions.. for the betterment of themselves and society?
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HMW create a platform that meets the high tech expectations of the new age tech savvy user, yet provide the older non-tech confident users with a platform they find comfortable to use?
Information Architecture
Based on the inputs from brainstorming session I was able to list down features and information that had to be shown.
By card sorting method I was able to create a structure and organize content.
Paper Sketches
Rough ideas were jotted down using pen and paper, the best ideas were then translated to lo-fi wireframes.
I created two approaches for navigation as shown below, option 1 has long scroll whereas option 2 has tabs on top to easily navigate to different categories. As per research users are also interested in trending content so a trending news feature was added. Lot of platforms like instagram, twitter, facebook, youtube have trending hashtag feature, basis on the Jakob's law I introduced this feature in news for ZEE5.
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
Jakob's law
Wireframes
Further upon internal discussions the best possible ideas that would help both business and the users were translated to lo-fi wireframes. It also helped to identify any loop holes in the flow and engineer reverse navigation. You can see below the iterations of Home page of News section.
V.1
All entry points to different sections are given in Top Navigation.This approach is slightly difficult to access.
V.2
Only two important tabs are included in top navigation, it other sections were not getting equal importance.
V.3
Bottom navigation was introduced.
But only few categories could be
addressed in Top navigation
V.4
Primary top nav. is accompanied with secondary nav. for ease of use, and the Top nav. has only 3 important tabs
Visual Designs
The final step was to add a visual language to the designs. ZEE 5 already had a style guide of their super app which follows a black theme. Our challenge here was to follow those guidelines and at the same time cater to the needs of user who wanted a light background for smooth reading experience.
Home - Top Highlights
The users take breaks in between so the Home page has a curated list of Top Highlights of the day for the user to quickly browse through
Following and Near Me
Once the user starts to Follow channels, topic or people he will be able to view personalized content as per his choice under this tab.
Near me filters the news as per city selected and city the user is present in
Stories
The stories are an effective ways to show share news n crisp interactive format, where users can get snippets of whats happening in less than 30 secs
Fact Check
PIB is a machinery that verifies news, adding this would help users to identify fake news and build trust.
Conclusion
This was my second project for ZEE5, the first was designing the Super App. The project presented with many challenges,
Research was a crucial part of this project as we had a broad range of target audience it was difficult to cater to all of their needs. The way news is perceived by younger generation vs elder generation differs a lot.
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By following the right process I was able to deliver a design that caters to all of their needs.