CLIENT
Turkcell
ROLE
Lead Product Design
YEAR
2016
Previously launched in 2008 as Turkey’s first music search engine, fizy quickly became fans' favourite and gained global popularity as it won a Mashable Award in 2011.
However, shortly afterwards, fizy and its services came to a halt in 2011 due to new legislations around music streaming. Fizy was later acquired by Turkcell, and soon after was renamed to Turkcell Music.
My journey with fizy started when I was tasked with redesigning and eventually bringing fizy back to life as a multi-platform music service since Turkcell Music failed to deliver what fizy fans expected from its successor.
DON'T YOU WANT ME
Turkcell Music was not famous for having the smoothest experience for the user. It also suffered from not positioning the new brand very well with its old reputation. It failed terribly when it came to delivering a seamless experience between its web and mobile music player.
Information architecture was very poor, discovering new music and keeping track of the user's music library was almost impossible.
While we learned a lot from these insights and knew what to improve when we started the project, the biggest challenge for us came from somewhere else.
The new app, fizy wasn't going to be released anytime soon so we had to keep working on new features and improving the user experience for the legacy app, Turkcell Music.
This also meant when fizy launches in the future, we had to focus on the existing users and make sure they'll have the least friction. And we all know how annoying that feeling is when you update your favourite app to the latest version and you are immediately overwhelmed with the major changes that have been made.
THE PROTOTYPE
but, how did it all begin?
WIND OF CHANGE
We'll need to rewind a bit for this...
Turkcell Music went back to its original name, fizy. But not just that - a new logo, a new visual language, a new tone of speech. And it wanted to distance itself from Turkcell Music in any way possible.
While as a studio agency, we usually focused on building the right products, we tried to establish strong communications between us, who were designing the product. and the team who was refreshing the brand.
On the topic of communication, another thing fizy tried to communicate was how much it wanted to reach out to it's "die-hard fans", who have abandoned all hope once it was acquired by a large company like Turkcell.
But how do you balance between reaching out to your old customer base while making sure existing users are happy with the changes? After all, before becoming fizy, Turkcell Music with the old brand and app, they still had the most number of users compared to any other streaming platform in Turkey.
YOU CAN'T HURRY LOVE
Even though the previous brand was centred about being domestically focused, what we had in our hands was a brand looking forward to the global market, both mentally and visually. So we had to do everything properly this time and convinced the client to help it making so. We spared no expense timewise, started on an already existing app structure but also building fundamentals from scratch -from finding the right solutions to existing problems to planning the information architecture of the new app.
Shortly after printing out the current customer journey and every screen within the app, we re-built every screen by drawing wireframes.
One of the bigger things app missed were states and funnelling. Over thirty of those over two hundred wireframes were implemented to provide users with what we thought should be the next step for a better experience. Once finished with wireframes, we created all user journeys with multiple workflows, both for helping everyone on the project to have a better view of the project and understanding of the key moments within all customer journeys.
SHAPE OF MY HEART
Before getting into high fidelity design for the app, we were handed with a new brand logo and fonts. While Gotham Rounded typeset was a good fit for the new brand, we needed an alternative font for the interface; all digital products, microsites and the playlist artworks.
We've decided to go with two Google web fonts: Poppins for websites and display, and Nunito as a suitable replacement for Gotham Rounded.
WE BUILT THIS CITY
We worked with the internal development team at Turkcell to build the product. As expected with any relaunch, lots of unexpected issues started happening. Deadlines were moved, some of the capabilities were scoped down. We were quick on our feet to adapt to those changes and working within agile development sprints with them. We've also run our design sprints as well which led us to conduct multiple user research sessions over the building period.
Even though a few sentences would never do justice for the amount of effort we've put into the product, we could say it was exhausting, eye-opening and exciting. The product owner on the client-side stated she was quite surprised "how quickly everything was moving in the right direction".
Finally, after months of work product was almost ready to launch. And even if the launch of the product won't reach the numbers that were expected from the "business", we'd still be quite happy on how we approached the whole process and how we built a product that would be ready to launch not just locally but globally.
300+
SCREEN DESIGNS
600+
NEW MOBILE ASSETS
200+
PLAYLIST & IN-APP BANNER ARTWORK
CUSTOMER JOURNEYS
WONDERFUL TONIGHT
As mentioned before, we were set to build a product, not an interface and we wanted to change how fizy is perceived holistically. This wouldn't happen without reworking on one of the bigger parts of the product: artworks.
Having added a slot for banner artworks in home screen to promote content, we felt the need to design guidelines for designing those artworks for microsites, album, artist or playlists. We've eventually made it possible so a simple builder would import the imagery and content from the API.
Next part of the artworks were fizy exclusive playlists. To the day we've started designing them, there were more than seven thousand playlists curated over the last four years. Numbers were huge but had to start somewhere and we did that by creating templates such as fizy moods, Artist's selection, popular sub-genres, best of "x" etc.
WHOLE LOTTA LOVE
One thing to add to this case study is the sheer amount of exclusive and promoted contents that Turkcell focused on both pre-launch and post-launch. They had a large variety; from exclusive live concert streams to timely exclusive album launches of country's lead artists and bands.
Similar to the challenges we had when designing the app, we had to keep everything visually similar to the new app when building those content-focused websites. However, those microsites didn't have to follow the brand guidelines so we had more creative freedom while designing them!
NOTHING'S GONNA
STOP US NOW
On December 15th, 2016, fizy launched on AppStore and a week later on Google Play. Because of the marketing "reasons", there was only a brief social media announcement.
However, the impact was far bigger than anticipated - we were hitting every KPI. The app also reached its highest average scores on both platforms since the launch in 2009
The great success of the app led us to secure design projects fizy Web and fizy tvOS apps - which then was quite well integrated with the mobile experience.
115%
INCREASE IN IOS USER UPTIME
700%
INCREASE IN ANDROID USER UPTIME
40%
INCREASE IN DAILY SONG STREAMS
150%
INCREASE IN DAILY APP DOWNLOADS
4.7
AVERAGE RATING IN APP STORE & GOOGLE PLAY STORE
video killed the radio star.
Shortly after launching fizy mobile, we started working on a tvOS app for fizy. We aimed to keep the experience very familiar with fizy-lovers. It had similar features to the mobile app - discovery, fizy-otherapist, my library. However, on top of that, we've built a new feature around "home use", where most Apple TVs are used.
With a focused effort, we were able to launch it 2 months after the project kick-off. At the time it became the first music streaming app in tvOS platform in Turkey.