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What is a Special Day?
A ‘Special Day’ in India includes religious festivals, days of national importance, days in remembrance of important people and events.
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Special Day is a unique widget that comes pre-installed in Samsung Z3 Smartphones. The widget provides with all the information on upcoming Special Days or festivals that have their own unique rituals and the historical significance.
The project was designed and launched for Samsung Z3 smartphones that was powered by Tizen. This presentation is a proof-of-concept (POC) to extend Special Day to Android and embed it within My Galaxy: a native application from Samsung for the Indian market for entertainment, exclusive deals, discounts and premium offers.
KEY FEATURES
History behind the festival
Activities required to be performed
Add flavour to the day by preparing delicacies
Explore near-by places to visit
Send customised greeting card to your contacts*
*Greeting cards were discontinued for Android POC.
KEY PROPOSITION
A time-bound feature, helping users celebrate a special day by bringing in:
Relevance
Using storytelling to collate all content specific to the Special Day in one placeSurprise Element
New offers & content generated periodically, creating positive anticipation in usersConvenience
All relevant deals and discounts under one banner with a special focus on ‘connected services’Explicit Value
Cost benefit: Special discounts and offers only available during that time periodImplicit Value
Cultural / emotional connection: info, auspicious time, recipes
My Role
In this project, I switched between interaction and visual design roles. I was a part of the team of product designers who created the Z3 Special Day Widget for Tizen. Thereafter, I single-handedly created the proof of concept to connect Special Day with the ecosystem of (the already launched) My Galaxy and get it ready for an Android release.
Special Day for Tizen:
Visual Design
Photography
Illustration
Special Day POC for Android:
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototype and Testing
User Needs
“Need to do last minute Diwali shopping. Wish I could quickly see all Diwali related offers in one place.”
“Can I quickly see fun places & events around me for Christmas? I want to plan my evening on the go.”
“My new neighbours invited us for Onam. Wish I could quickly read up about the festival to prepare better.
Special Days can be categorized into two parts:
Cultural Connect (content created by Samsung) and
Offers and Experiences (third-party tie-ups).
Cultural Connect
About
Information, trivia, ritualsBest Time
Auspicious time with set reminder featureEvents
A list of events, religious buildings, performances etc. within a radius of 30 kms around youRecipes
Explore recipes unique to the Special Day, that can be cooked easily at home. Additionally access more traditional food related content
Offers and Experiences
Gifting
Gift cards, jewellery & other gift itemsShopping
Apparel, confectionery and special sweetsTravel
Exclusive deals & discounts on airfare, train tickets and buses(…more)
Key Screens
Wireframes and Visual Designs
Process
In a pre-agile, water-fall model of development, my process as a part of the UX team included a linear progression from user research (in this case, secondary research and focus-group interviews) followed by mapping out information architecture and user journeys. Once the flows were reviewed and finalized, I worked iteratively on the visual design that was in-sync with Tizen’s brand guidelines and subsequently Samsung’s Android guidelines for flagship phones.
Creating ‘Special Day’ for Tizen Z7:
I was involved as a visual designer and my process included:
Studying the Tizen visual design guidelines
Creating Special Day wallpapers for 55 Indian festivals
Visual Assets and Icon Creation
Creating Graphical User Interface (GUI) Guideline for development.
Designing the POC:
In this stage of adapting and enhancing ‘Special Day’ to Android, I contributed both as an interaction designer and visual designer. I began with:
Secondary Research
Focus-Group Discussions
Information Architecture followed by
End-to-end User Journeys
Low-Fidelity Prototyping
Visual Design - High Fidelity Screens
POC Presentation Creation
Ideation sheet 1: Mapping all components on Special Days
Ideation sheet 2: Connected Services and connections with My Galaxy
Mapping flows for Special Days w.r.t My Galaxy
Building connections and overlaps of Special Day with My Galaxy.
Scenarios: Hyperlocal and Connected Services
Expected Response
“Interesting information on rituals, recipes and trivia. I am learning so many new things!”
About Special Days
“The alarm feature has made life so easy. We can now set reminders directly for Sehri and Iftar timings from it.”
Best Time
“Customize greeting cards with your own photos. Very playful and nice!”
Send Gifts & Cards
Key Achievements
Creating Content
As part of the first launch of Special Day for Tizen, I got the opportunity to take full ownership for the visual design direction. This included creating content in-house: widget design, visual assets, mockups, photographs for recipe section, wallpapers for 55 Indian festivals. As a team we collaborated with third party vendors for content writing for ‘About’ section (history and rituals), recipe content and ‘Auspicious Time / Abhijit Muharat’.
Added a section ‘My Special Day’ to enter your anniversary, birthday and other important dates.
Trend Analysis
Through secondary research and focus-group discussions, I put together an analysis report of the key players and their focus on areas for monetization by becoming an aggregator platform:
Travel: either taking a holiday or coming home
Gifting: Spreading joy among family and friends
Shopping: Revamping wardrobe because it’s Diwali
Monetization Opportunities
One of the business objectives of Special Day within My Galaxy was to give a premium platform for service providers to feature their offerings. As a designer, my aim was to engage the user through storytelling and in the process intelligently embed contextual ads & promotional content.
Ads can camouflage into the list views of pre-loaded content (with a ‘Sponsored’ Tag). This ensures no break in the structure of the page or compromise the seamlessness of the user journey.
Monetization Opportunities
with contextual sponsored content and advertisements
Result and take-aways
As part of the POC, we (the UX team) were able to articulate to the stakeholders in the leadership teams the value proposition of Special Days through the following:
Value addition: Customized deals and discounts, relevant to the respective Special Days.
Engagement: Videos, music and games as part of Entertainment. Additional trivia, recipes & places related to Special Day.
Empathy: Special Day carefully brings together deals & rich content depending on your interests and selection of events. Remembers your birthday, anniversary, personal events.
Convenience: All relevant offers, rich content collated under one banner. Connected services creates seamless journeys for availing deals and experiencing relevant content.
Gift-cards emerged as a potential star feature that was to be followed up for discussion. This was because it gave the autonomy of recipients to select products of their choice, convenience while making transactions instead of personal cards and ease to track via email without the fear of losing physical copy. We also observed a trend of consumers end up spending more than the actual value of the card to buy gifts, especially around Special Days.
