Media App
Client: Hungama Digital Media Pvt. Ltd.
Predictive Analysis | Music | Movies | TV Shows | Radio | Events
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In 2015, Hungama came up with a unique vision of creating a one-stop entertainment app that would cater to all the media needs of an individual, offering music, movies, tv shows, internet radio & international events - all packaged within a single application.
This was an incredible challenge!
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Most apps focus on only one or a maximum of two of the above mentioned media forms. The reason for that is simple - it is a herculean task to offer so much content to users & yet keep the UX simple, intuitive, personal & clean!
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This now, was our Gordian Knot to untie...
01. UNDERSTANDING THE DOMAIN
There was a week-long session planned with our clients to understand their business, but before that, we wanted to study the media consumption behavior in India in an unbiased & ground-up fashion.
App Reviews
Studying reviews given by people on the competing apps on the app stores to study what people like, dislike & need.
Blogs & Articles
Reading blogs & articles that talk about the comparative design & experience of the app.
Media Reports
Studying published reports on the market trends created by Ericsson, Deloitte & ...
Heuristic UI Analysis
Studying the UI of the competitor apps to identify strong and weak points in the user experience.
 App Reviews |  Blogs & Articles |  Media Reports |  Heuristic UI Analysis |
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02. PRIMARY RESEARCH
It was important to feel the pulse of the market first hand. Given that India has a very diverse population, it was extremely interesting to observe people’s preferences, pain-points & desires when it comes to a media app.
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We realised that the media consumption patterns in India would vary over the following parameters, hence, we tried to spread the sample-set of interviewees over them:
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Age Groups: 15 - 18 y.o.a | 22 - 29 y.o.a | 35 - 42 y.o.a | 45 - 60 y.o.a
Economic Brackets: Lower-Middle | Middle | Upper-Middle
Regions: Northern | Central & Western | Eastern | Southern
Interest Inclination: Mainstream | Off-beat
02. KEY OBSERVATIONS
01
Personal Consumption
The rapid penetration of the Internet via mobile phones has now made content consumption an individual activity rather than family based. Individual taste, schedule & mood takes precedence.
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Access over Ownership
02
On-Demand
Need
As the prime offering of most products & serices is convenience & personalisation, the natural trend followed in media is the same. There has been a steady increase in consumption of on demand content.
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Context & Mood
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Precious Mobile Data
Despite the advent of 3G & 4G, mobile data speed in India is not very impressive & rather expensive. An app that loads media fast & consumes less mobile data would win the race.
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Content Discovery
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Rural Market Dividend
Rural consumption in recent times has been growing at a faster pace than urban consumption patterns, given the increase in income and literacy levels, and 4G mobile devices.
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Social Sharing
Rather than owning & wasting storage space, users want to rent, consume & discard content.
Context, mood & activity strongly influence the form & genre of media consumed apart from personal taste.
Users need a stong, sound, accurate & intuitive mechanism to discover new content based on their taste & mood.
Users need more fun ways of sharing & co-enjoying media with their friends.
02. KEY INSIGHTS
01
Video Codec
There needs to be a strong development on the video codec that would consume less data & would stream faster.
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Content Discovery
We need to delve deeper into user behavior to understand how people like to discover content. A successful discovery model would expand the user base.
02
Save Offline
Downloading media over the wifi & saving it offline should be should be pushed as a key behavior for the users while using the app.
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Content Library
Content library has to be extremely vast with regional, international, devotional, kids, mainstream & offbeat content. If users find all content here, they wouldn’t have to switch apps.
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Play & Chill
In order to increase consumption, the app must offer relevant media in queue without needing user input. After hitting the play button, the stream of media should be continuos.
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Tailored for Each
We need to evoke the emotion - “this app understands me”, in the users. The app should be beyond a smart library of content.
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Social Sharing
Including innovative ideas such as ‘dubsmash’ or creating memes would enhance the fun-social aspect of the app & make the users more intimately engrossed with it.
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Surprise Me
Though the primary consumption pattern is on-demand, there needs to be an element of pleasant unexpectedness & surprise.
03. PERSONAS
04. WORKSHOP WITH THE CLIENT
Post the short research phase to understand the domain from an unbiased standpoint, we then organised a week-long interaction with our client at their head-office in Mumbai. There were several workshops, activities & discussions planned for the week to achieve the following goals as defined by us:
01.
Domain understanding & insights from in-house experts.
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Understanding the current business model & strategy.
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Knowing their target audience so far & beyond.
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Knowing their vision & business goals for the product.
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Understanding the technological constraints of the company.
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Knowing the financial constraints & budget allocations.
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Knowing the limitations of content library & sourcing.
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Working on a timeline for the various phases of the project.
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Existing app & design intention behind each element.
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User feedback, complaints & requests so far on the current app.
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New feature ideas & concepts from the internal team.
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Brand essence that needs to reflect in the app.
05. IDEATION
Rigorous sessions of group & individual ideation while keeping the research, personas & business goals in mind.
06. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
FEW KEY WIREFRAMES
VISUAL DESIGN LIGHT THEME
VISUAL DESIGN DARK THEME
FINAL CONCEPT
01. CONCEPT DIRECTION
An app that almost magically understands what the consumer feels like enjoying at each moment.
A system which could somehow gauge moods and situations, and tailor the experience around one’s life.
A service that could understand what kind of content one wants at a point in time and help one explore more content of the same kind.
If we carefully study the daily lives of our consumers, we find that there is a degree of repetition in terms of habits, schedules and patterns (and therefore, predictability). This also governs the media consumption preferences of each individual.
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Consumption of media is situation-dependent
Where you are, what you’re up to, whether on your drive to work, or out on a morning jog, whether you want some time out for your self, or have friends over for dinner - all these situations dictate a preference for a certain kind of media.
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Whether it’s action movies, soft songs or party numbers, it’s the mood and situation that influence the consumption of the medium.
These activities are mapped to the time of the day, day of the week, and also, the time of the year. Other factors governing the situation could be weather, location and activity.
Time of the day
Time of the year
Activity
Location
Weather
02. CONCEPT
THE ULTIMATE EXPLORER
In time. Out of time. Travel time. Bored time. Expect Hungama to surprise you every moment.
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It reads your life, learns your behavior. And crafts content to match your mood. At all places and all times.
Your one touch leap to entertainment.
03. SKELETON
Status Bar
Global Menu & Icons
Contextual Prediction Space
Hungama's Library of Content
Floating Action Button
Device Navigation Bar
CONTEXTUAL RECOMMENDATIONS
Taking in information from sources such as weather, user listening/viewing patterns and time of the day, this section of the app provides recommendations that hope to surprise and engage the user and make him say “This app understands me”.
LIBRARY
This section of the app provides all the content from which the user can make selections based on his/her personal preferences and acts as a catalog to the world of entertainment that is Hungama.
ULTIMATE EXPLORER
The floating action button within the app, opens up the exploration section of the app helps the user browse through the vast content in an engaging manner.
04. THE ULTIMATE EXPLORER
We studied the conversational style of people and understood the patterns in which they express their media consumption needs. Two distinct patterns emerged:
1. Fuzzy expression of a mixture of mood/situation/activity.
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“I want something funny that has a little bit of action”
“I want something that has suspense and murder mystery”
“I want devotional music, but only instrumental”
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2. Example based expression
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“I want something like this movie”
“I want songs like ‘tip tip barsa paani’…”
1. PLANNED
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Leisurely craft or curate the result based on expressing your mood/situation/activity based needs.
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2. SPONTANEOUS
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Drag and drop content into the floating action button to show similar and related content
1. 'Planned' Workflow
The Movies section will preview -
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1. Genres – Comedy, Action, Drama, Sci-fi, Horror, Fantasy....
2. Eras – 90’s, 80’s, old classics
3. Themes – Musicals, Wedding, Sports, Cars, Bikes...
4. Legends – Amitabh Bacchan, Shahrukh Khan, Jhonny Depp, Jim Carrey
2. 'Spontaneous' Workflow
Drag & Drop
The user can drag a movie into the Floating-Action-Button and a new page would open up to help him discover movies similar to the one he picked.
05. THE LIBRARY
ENHANCE BROWSING EXPERIENCE
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The previous tile system showed only posters and didn’t really engage the user enough.
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With this system, the user would find it easier to perform quick browsing and previewing and at the same time, rent the movie immediately if interested.
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The most used and natural action for a user while browsing for a film (watching a trailer) has been brought out to the front to enhance the browsing experience.
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CATEGORIES
New releases
Recommendations for you
Genres
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Special categories interspersed:
Amitabh Bachhan’s birthday
IIFA Award Nominies
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This space has been designed to be flexible so that the content team at Hungama can alter it freely on a daily basis based on the trends and news-making content.
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Some surprise cards will be shown as well based on the context. For example:
Your Friend’s birthday is coming up, surprise him with
Since you liked Golmal, Here is the album you could enjoy
06. STICKINESS
GAMIFICATION & MEMES
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To add an element of fun & stickiness, we introduced several games that would be shown as challenges to the users through notifications. These games would not only help the users in earning badges, but the rewards would also unlock some of the paid VOD content.
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The 'meme' trend has been significant in the social media world. Riding on this wave, we offered a way to create & share memes through Hungama.
