Gaana iOS & Android app Revamp

Problem

We were catering everything. Yes, this was our major issue. We were depending on our users and letting them decide what they wanted to listen. But this is not how our users thought. I conducted a concise user research in year 2018 among our friends, relatives, colleagues, vendors, people around the office area. For which I made a questionnaire focusing on some major decisive points and were distributed through email, messages and actual face to face surveying.

Also, with ever increasing content and new features, the android and iOS app had became confusing and less intuitive. There was no design language and too much cognitive load. My aim was to reduce these pain points and make the app more usable and easy to navigate for anyone, no matter the age or qualification.

Approach

The discovery phase took a while, it allowed us to define project milestones. We scrutinised our existing work, reviewed our competitors and began research into our user needs, behaviours and pain‐points. We created a brief but to the point questionnaire which would give an insight on the listening pattern of our users and their music preference. I undertook this project in year 2018. It took approx. 3 months, including all research and iterations time.

One of the participant said that, “I used Gaana for sometime but I couldn’t discover what I wanted to listen, so I switched to Saavn.” Another participant said, “Gaana has vast collection of music but its UI is confusing, sometimes I search and listen to a song but I am not able to discover music of my choice without using search.”

These were the few feedbacks and also pain points of our app. The data collected from the survey highlighted that there were four kind of music listeners and we needed to understand these users and cater music for each one of them. We categorised and named such users in 4 personas: Wanderer, Looper, Discoverer and The Socialist. My goal was to make the design and flow intuitive and accessible, so that each type of user were able to discover music of their choice easily.