Despite WOLF evolving their core product over the past 16 years, there was still a lack of user research, testing, and user-centred design. Since the user base for WOLF has grown significantly since being adopted in Arabic markets, there was a large focus on retaining existing users rather than focusing on new users. As a result, engaging and retaining new users was proving difficult, and needed proper research & attention to improve.
Until I was brought into the engagement, WOLF had not yet experienced user-centred design, so it was my responsibility to lead and empower this new way of working within their organisation if changes were to be made.
There were many areas of the platform that needed focusing on, so the first steps were identifying a clear roadmap of improvements, prioritised on the value added to new users.
Once this was identified, we tackled each item, working in agile sprints, to research and discover the technical limitations that we as designers had to work with. For the most part, I would conduct basic competitor research and analysis of existing industry standards in order to help bring WOLF up to the level of their competition, but when possible we sourced additional resource to conduct user interviews and testing to ensure we were keeping a user centred approach to the work.
Throughout the past year, we have significantly enhanced various user journeys, focusing on both refining existing experiences and developing innovative features. Some of these enhancements include:
- New popup system to offer visibility for levelling up and encourage engagement
- Added sign up prompts to the signed out user experience
- Built a brand new ‘community interest selection’ feature that allows users to select a hub to join during the onboarding flow in order to show them content that is relevant to them.
- Redesigned the discover elements to increase the visibility of the clickable areas.
- All new way to consume content via a recorded shows section, as previously the only way to consume content was to listen live.
- Created a brand new way for users to send gifts to those in a channel or performing live on stage.
And many more other improvements & new features...
Whilst the core methodologies of user experience research & design stand true no matter the market, there are so many cultural nuances that I’ve learnt whilst working with an Arabic team, and designing for Arabic users; designing for different languages, ensuring designs can translate for RTL layouts, font sizes, imagery and media, to name a few. It’s been very interesting, and a market I’d be keen to continue exploring.
Throughout all of this, there were other larger chunks of work that I did that I feel require their own page, so if you’d like to read about the smart multi-platform design system that I built for them, you can give it a read by clicking the button below.
View design system case study
