ZEUX Innovation partners with Discovery India to deliver country’s first aggregated real-life entertainment app

ZEUX Innovation has partnered with Discovery India to design the Discovery+ app. The app was launched on 18 March 2020 and continues to garner good reviews across major app stores for its content and user experience.

Commenting on the collaboration Discovery India business head Issac John said, “As a product, our team was very conscious of solving barriers for user adoption in a cluttered OTT market like India. The various research and design workshops that ZEUX led for us, placed user motivations at the heart for solving these barriers. The iterative work, completed over several months, has paid rich dividends for us as expressed by the umpteen user reviews that have highlighted the rich yet simple to navigate UI & UX of Discovery Plus”.

Some thoughts behind the UX design:

One-stop-shop	As a first step, ZEUX conducted foundational research with target users across India to ascertain Discovery’s app consolidated strategy. Other insights gathered regarding content preferences, subscription models, pricing, etc. also helped establish a clear app strategy and laid down a solid foundation for the design effort.
Discoverability	ZEUX completely re-imagined the content categorisation approach for Discovery+ and created several innovative content buckets and micro-genres (such as: time of day, emotion, content length, life stage, brag value, etc.). This not only ensured that the overall information architecture of the app matches the target users’ mental models but also enhanced content findability.
Stickiness	The unique ”Shorts” feature was an innovation crafted specifically to enhance engagement for the new-age generation. Never seen before on any OTT platform, Shorts brought snackable non-fiction content & infinite scrolling to offer a unique engagement strategy for Discovery+
Shareability	ZEUX built a hyper-simple sharing experience by seamlessly integrating user’s most preferred sharing channel (WhatsApp) into the app interface. This innovation has proven to be a key factor in enhancing content share-ability resulting in higher organic user acquisitions for Discovery+
Intelligence	Circular content toggles at the top of key pages were created by ZEUX to ensure that the home & landing pages for core content categories showcase Discovery’s vast content breadth and depth. Click-data from the toggles also fortified the app’s intelligence gathering mechanism and fuelled its content personalisation & recommendation engines.

Commenting on the same ZEUX Innovation co-founder Saurabh Gupta, said, “We are proud to be the UX design partner for Discovery+. We leveraged the science of human performance & persuasion design to craft an OTT experience that is a perfect balance between delivering specific business outcomes, addressing diverse user needs and effectively managing technology considerations”.

Adding to the perspective another co-founder Hemal Gathani stated, “Client support was the key factor in transforming our thoughts into reality. The fact that the Discovery team supported our thought process and empowered us to think laterally, led to a seamless delivery from our end”.