Growth & User Acquisition at Zee5
Designing with data and documenting design
Role: Senior Product designer
Charter: Acquisition
Problem:
- Login success rate measured below industry standard of 95% to 99%. Our success rate fluctuated around 72% which meant user who wanted to login were not being able to complete the flow.
- No documentation existed for the charter. Multiple entry points and a complex web of login journeys being invoked from different sections of the app, meant we were tackling every problem screen by screen and not envisioning a user journey.
Impact:
- The team was able to improve the login success rate to a capacity of 98%
- We built a clear user journey map, revealing all the entry points that existed as well as the overlap where development effort was redundant.
- Recommendations based on user demographics.
- As well as enabling of features such as continue watching which had a significant impact on the total viewership.
- Also more reusable screens and components meant faster development as well as more capacity to experiment within the timeline. Also changes reflected across journeys without requiring additional bandwidth
Process:
We were inheriting the product from years of contract work, we lacked documentation as well as a unified design system. As a part of the onboarding I clarified what datapoints product and business were tracking to assess the health of the charter given that the roadmap was primarily built by the product and business teams on a quarterly time line. Design did not have final authority on what shipped, but had an opportunity to influence problem framing, experience quality, and downstream execution.
While BAU’s continued, I proactively documented the User journey and flows to understand the experience the charter encapsulated.
Some redundancies became apparent, we had multiple screens built and deployed in production, that served the same function. Example different looking screens for entering OTP, for entering Email Ids, etc. all accessible in production from different entry points.
A competitor analysis also indicated that we used a different strategy for user login, Zee did not gate its content behind a login screen like most apps of that time did. It preferred to allow users to consume content and nudge them towards signing up/logging in.
The team was in the midst of building a new login method that could reduce the number of steps a users would need to complete the journey. I took the opportunity to directly interact with the development team to understand what part of the flow would take them time to build. I learnt that they were having to build each part of the flow, from scratch each time, each button, input field, and even entire screens.
I took my learnings to build a simplified flow, that could give users a more predictable experience and allow developers to reuse components from earlier journeys.
I was able to summerise the flow on figma and even presented it to the team who appreciated the effort and could see how development would be easier, implementing this change would require us to rewrite the overlapping screens and as the roadmap was primary built by business and product. I could not push for development then.
When the team began exploring alternatives to truecaller due to regulatory concerns. I seized the opportunity to embed reusable components rather as we developed a sim login, inspired by banking apps, who would auto detect a sim and log the user with an SMS rather than an OTP.
This allowed us to create multiple entry points and nudge users to login, without needing to start from scratch.
Direct impact:
We were able to increase our login success rate from 72% to nearly 98%. Which in plain english ment more users who started the journey of logging in completed it.
Logging had an enabling impact on other journeys downstream, owned by other charters.
- We got better understanding of who our users are as identification became possible.
- Lesser cost leak in the form of OTP cost.
- Which had a downstream effect of increased ad monetisation by way of better cost per view.
- Better understanding of our users demographic data.
- Recommendations based on user demographics.
- As well as enabling of features such as continue watching which had a significant impact on the total viewership.
- Also more reusable screens and components meant faster development as well as more capacity to experiment within the timeline. Also changes reflected across journeys without requiring additional bandwidth
Learning
Clarity and documentation became a key part of my work going forward as I saw direct impact of the same.
This was my first time working with live user data, coming from a design agency, this taught me how to read data funnels.
I learned that surfacing foundational issues early is not enough. Building early alignment with decision makers is critical to creating space for improvements in beyond the roadmap.
having to build each part of the flow, from scratch each time, each button, input field, and even entire screens.