CLIENT
Turkcell
ROLE
Lead Product Design
YEAR
2016 - 2017
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 wasn't well-known for providing the smoothest experience to users. Additionally, it struggled to position its new brand effectively with its previous reputation. It was notably unsuccessful in offering a seamless experience between its web and mobile music player. The information architecture was quite weak, making it nearly impossible to discover new music and manage the user's music library.
Though we gained invaluable insights from these observations and were aware of areas to enhance when initiating the project, our greatest challenge emerged from an entirely different aspect.
The new mobile app, fizy, wasn't going to be released anytime soon, so we needed to continue developing new features and enhancing the user experience for the legacy app, Turkcell Music. This also implied that when fizy launches in the future, we had to concentrate on the existing users and ensure they'll encounter minimal friction. As we all know, that frustrating sensation when you upgrade your favorite app to the newest version and are suddenly overwhelmed with significant changes that were implemented.
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.
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.
YOU CAN'T HURRY LOVE
Even though the prior brand emphasized its domestic orientation, we now held a brand aiming for the international market, both in mindset and appearance. Thus, we had to ensure all was done correctly this time and persuaded the client to assist us in achieving this. We didn't skimp on time investment, began with an existing app framework but also established basics from the ground up – from identifying the right solutions to current issues to strategizing the information architecture of the new app.
Shortly after printing the current customer journey and every screen in the app, we reconstructed each screen by sketching wireframes. One significant aspect the app lacked was states and funneling. Over thirty of the more than two hundred wireframes were incorporated to offer users improved guidance for an enhanced experience. After completing the wireframes, we developed all user journeys with multiple workflows, both to assist everyone on the project in gaining a better overview and understanding of the pivotal moments in 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
300+
ARTWORK FOR PLAYLIST
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.
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
4.7/5
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.
VIEW FIZY ON APP STORE
VIEW FIZY ON GOOGLE PLAY