Iroko: Redesigning the Mobile TV Experience for Nigeria
The Challenge
To take an application I use often and see how far I can push myself creatively by building it from the ground up in a week.
I chose the Iroko TV app because I have always been a movie lover. I started using the app late last year and it’s been really decent so far. So I immediately jumped on the opportunity to design the app.
Platform: Android
Roles played: User Researcher | UI/UX designer | Product Designer | Data Analyst
Tools: Adobe Photoshop, InVision Studio
Side note: I do not work for Iroko TV and the opinions from this case study are strictly mine. I admit that unlike the designers that work at Iroko, I don’t have full access to the data that influences their current design and features. As a result, my redesign is not exhaustive.
Goals for the redesign
My goals for the redesign were to:
1. To facilitate a more seamless experience while discovering and watching movies on the app, yet keep the design familiar to the Iroko brand.
2. To design a more intuitive and personable experience.
3. To design following the principles of sound experience design.
For personal development:
1. To develop my skills in conducting and analyzing user research, creating wire-frames and animating prototypes.
2. To complete my first design project from start to finish.
3. To begin writing for UX.
Iroko TV at a Glance
Iroko TV is one of Africa’s first mainstream online movie streaming products. Through its mobile application and web platform, Iroko provides thousands of Nigerian films and TV series on demand all over Africa.
User Research
Irrespective of the time frame I had, it was important that I wasn’t designing solely from my point of view. To begin my redesign project, I interviewed 5 users. This interview group was made up of 2 males and 3 females, all within the age range of 24 to 35. The time they had spent using the app ranged from 4 years to 8 months.
Asides this, I also spent the first day of the design week reading through a ton of app reviews on Playstore. Some major pain points I noticed were:
- Stressful process of updating app with new movies.
- Inability to watch movies without internet access.
- No standard way of finding movies that interest you.
Based on the interviews and reviews, I developed an affinity diagram:
Meet the Movie Lovers: Personas
With the responses from my user interviews, I created the following personas. These are the people I will have in mind while redesigning the app:
Tolu
Tolu is a 25 year-old youth corper. When she isn’t busy serving her country, Tolu enjoys reading and watching movies. She’s an all-out romantic and is always on the lookout for new and exciting Rom flicks on Iroko TV. She also has a list of actors that she can count on to deliver just that.
Caleb
Caleb is a 33 year-old engineer based in Ghana. He’s a social guy and enjoys hanging out with friends and the usual workplace banter. For him, Iroko TV is a way to connect with the culture back home & start up conversations at work. Asides cultural movies which he actively watches, Caleb is open to discovering films of all genres.
The Redesign
Home Page
Immediately after opening the app, users are met with a page showing various foreign series and an overcrowded rooftop deck. Asides the fact that this meant a lot of stretching, this made them less memorable.
A crucial part of my interview was telling each of the 5 users to draw the home page of the Iroko app in 30 seconds without looking. The most accurate drawing only remembered the first three icons and the search bar.
The Solution
Nigerian content is the greatest selling point of the Iroko TV app till date, so it seemed logical enough to make this content front and center.
I also brought the Sync option to the home screen, cutting the movie refresh process down to a one-step user journey. The rooftop deck was substituted for a bottom bar.
Collapsible video information meant that users could now learn about the movies without leaving the home screen.
Customer care remains a forte of the Iroko Team so I was mindful to keep it close by across the entire app. I also moved the Free movies notifications to a space of its own (more on this later).
Finally, I added in a dark theme mode for fellow late night users. Only 1 out of the 5 people I interviewed routinely watched movies during the day.
TV Series
I never understood why Nigerian series were on a totally different page than the foreign series. This meant that someone following a local and foreign series had to be shuttling between two page all the time.
So I put all series together in the same page. Adding a watch later feature meant you could come back to content that you liked when you were ready to make a download. No pressure.
A “Play Trailer” option gave users more access. This meant they didn’t have to download a movie or series and end up not liking it. 3 of the 5 users admitted to having downloaded films that turned out to not be what they were hoping for.
Finally, I brought the Stream option right next to the download option and displayed episode information, cutting down steps in the original user journey.
Categories Page
Perhaps the most insightful piece from the interview was gotten when I asked users how they decided on what movies to watch. One user took cues from social media and recommendations from friends. Another had devised her own method of guessing movies that she might be interested in.
But the truth was this: There was no standard way of helping users find what they were looking for and discover new interests.
I used information chips and a filtering system to give a method to the madness. Making use of horizontal sliders also allowed the user to explore all kinds of movies without leaving the page or feeling overwhelmed.
I also preferred everyday captions over the initial customized titles.
Stars
It wasn’t surprising to note that 4 out of 5 users considered actors as a major influence in deciding what movie to watch. I do the same thing all the time. Iroko TV made a good call to have stars shown on a movie page, so I decided to up the ante by adding Star notifications.
This way, users get notified every time their favorite stars had a new movie or series uploaded.
Accounts
Notifications (including the free movie notifications), Downloads and Account information were all scatters across three different places in the app.
I decided to put all these together in an Accounts page, where a user’s movies were categorized into downloads, watch list and shared videos. A continue watching option was also made available.
The Notification page was now a center for Star notifications, subscription mails and curated content, enhancing user engagement.
Reflecting on the work done
I made up my mind to do more deliberate design practice this year towards a career in product design. So I figured this challenge would be a great way for me to double up on all the reading I had been doing.
Looking back at my personal goals for taking up this challenge, its amazing to see how much growth I was able to achieve in user researching, prototyping and UX writing within a week.
That being said, the amount of research I did in this limited time is fairly small compared to what the Iroko TV design team must have done. I absolutely think that with a lot more research, user testing and iterations, my design can be much better.
After all, design is a continuous process.
You can check out my interactive prototype here.
Feel free to leave a comment, I would love to hear your thoughts on this study.
