Lifestyle Media App

Product Strategy, UX & UI Design

One very important thing I've learned over the years is that you could be designing the greatest, smoothest, most intuitive UX in the world and if you do usability testing, you'll see that they can actually perform the tasks well. But the success of that design will still always be contingent on how useful the product actually is to your users. Thus, the mindset of always taking time to step up the balcony and asking the WHYs of what you're doing is something I always try to integrate in anything I do. Said another way, true to the core of Design Thinking:

Design for the right thing, then design things right.

So when I started working on this new Lifestyle Media App (containing news and videos, among other types of content that the user can read or watch), which was in very early stages in the company, the first step I thought was critical to do was for us to crystallize what the foundational Product Strategy for this was before doing a deep dive on other activities like auditing the existing UX design and improving as necessary.

As a disclaimer, to maintain the confidentiality of the project (since it is still pending release), I won't be able to go as much into detail into the outcomes. I will, however, focus more on my thought process.

So in broad strokes, detailed below are the activities that I led prior to the start of the development of this project:

  • Project DetailsFrom previous employment
    June - Oct 2020
  • ParticipationProduct Strategy

    UX Audit triggering end-to-end redesign

    UX & UI Designs for the mobile app and employee-facing dashboards

    Card Sorting, Tree Testing, Usability Testing

    UI Style Guide

    Defining custom Firebase Analytics Events & User Properties

    Crafting Product Requirements Document
  • ToolboxMiro, Google Sheets
    Figma, Maze

Product Strategy & Design Process (View Hi-Res)

Noting from above, the Pre-Release Product-Market Fit Survey was something I felt very appropriate to do as early as possible—as soon as we had a rough idea of what the core Value Proposition and Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of the app would be. This would allow us to have a better feel of what would attract and/or deter people from trying/using the app.

Two key questions from the survey are below. Do note that this wasn't meant to be a high-N survey and we just wanted to get some insights right away, so voluntary response sampling was done and we focused on getting those that fit our Target Market profile to answer.

Quick & Dirty Product-Market Fit Survey

That said, deeper into the process, I was then able to crystallize the Customer Lifecycle for the app:

Customer Lifecycle (View Hi-Res)

Something to note from the above is that Account Registration is NOT required to starting using the app. All things considered, given we are essentially a very new brand that no one knows yet, this decision was made to immediately allow the user to appreciate the kind of content inside the app without such frictions. Account Registration will only be triggered to access secondary (but important!) features in the app that a user will try to use, such as Commenting or purchasing something.

That said, the updated UX flow for new users of the app is as pictured below:

New High-Level UX Flow (View Hi-Res)
Note: Some details omitted to maintain project confidentiality.

And as a last note, below is a zoom-in of some pertinent design decisions and features as I was designing the app:

No-Nonsense Account Registration

Previously, users had the option to sign up via:

  1. Email & User-Set Password
  2. Third-Party Login (Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter)
Third-Party Logins
I've always felt that designers should always use Third-Party Login methods sparingly and only if it actually makes the experience easier for the user.

What kind of data you would like to get from users during Account Registration is always a key factor here. Given what we wanted to get, Third-Party Logins proved to be an unnecessary friction to the user because not all of these platforms can actually give those details and in doing so, the users had to fill out the registration form again, rendering the Third-Party Login somewhat useless.

Email
By using email as an Account Registration method, the unintended effect would be alienating a huge part of the Filipino population that actually don't really find much use for emails. I know it sounds strange for people like me who treat an email account as a must-have, but we are not our users and this is simply the reality of designing on a market-specific basis.

All that said, this is why on the redesigned app, the mobile no. (paired with an OTP for verification) is the sole means to sign up or log in to your account.

Inclusivity 🌈

In full transparency, I myself identify as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community!

Objectively speaking though, I do think that in the context of the app's identified Early Adopters—Students (15-20 y.o.) and Working Professionals (20-34 y.o.)—and as a reflection of the company's intention to embrace inclusivity and diversity as well, having a third LGBTQIA+ option on the Gender field only made sense and would be a welcome sight for most of the app's users.

As I was doing research on best practices in going about this, there were definitely many ways to tackle this. Some allow Custom Genders to be set as well, which is something that I also thought about doing. But why I veered towards keeping it simple though with this all-encompassing LGBTQIA+ option was to be pragmatic.

In my head, Account Registration is simply something that most users would just want to get over with as quickly as possible and so having to think too much about what to set there and potentially having choice paralysis in the process felt a bit much for me.

Chill Mode

As one of the key differentiating features of this app, the inception of this featured I dubbed as "Chill Mode" was largely triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the height of the strict quarantines in the Philippines, I would hear comments from friends and people on social media that the situation has become too stressful for them and it has led some people to just want to isolate themselves first from all these news they've been seeing and either hibernate from any form of social media first or uninstall those apps completely. This then got me to thinking about how we could address these kinds of things for the users of this app. After all, mental health is incredibly important.

To highlight a couple of details:

  1. As a first version, we would be allowing free rein on what users can filter out before we invest too much in enabling advanced features that would be more appropriate for a latter stage, once we fully establish the utility of the feature.
  2. In relation to that, we decided to have a default 24-hour period for it to be enabled at a time as in principle, I believe we don't want to encourage people from being completely uninformed about things happening around them.