Radiohere is a hand curated multi lingual online radio stations
Radiohere reached #1 on ProductHunt, bringing in 36,000 listeners on launch day. Radiohere is a beautifully designed & hand curated list of online multilingual radio stations. Music inspires. Music is one of the most relatable and loved way to enjoy, express and calm yourself. It’s thoroughly inspiring by it’s mere subtle presence around you. So is the case with my wife, and myself. This is the UX story of how we built it ground up.
The Problem
- Though we have a great music collection, we were getting bored of the music collection over a period of 3 to 4 days. Repetition made it dull and exhaustive, quickly.
- Our hectic work lives limited us from searching extensively for great music.
- The paid subscription models available weren’t effective enough with music that we wanted to hear.
- Youtube which provide great recommendations consumed a lot of data, and slowed down the cache.
- The current online music places were really cluttered with bad experiences.
The Idea
My wife is already a pro-user when it comes to saavn and wynk. While losing interest, she suggested a search for good online radio channels.
It was a sad yet revealing moment when it hit me hard, that something so simple wouldn’t even exist! She started thinking of a great solution and came up with the idea of starting an online radio site.
And the idea was born. Out of, eh, love, again, as always.
The Hypothesis
- People still love serendipity over predictability sometimes. There was a reason we loved radios.
- Bringing back nostalgia, removing the paradox of choice, and having great conversations broadcasted around music is still relevant.
- If we provide a simple way to listen to radio, people would love it and use it regularly.
Objectives of this case study:
- Back up my hypothesis with data.
- Conduct testing to understand usability and uncover insights.
- Design a great product.
- Validate the design and improve upon the feedback.
The Research Process
Following on the IDEO based design thinking, I started with user empathy and ended up in prototyping and repeated validations. This process provided me with a roadmap and a solid foundation to base my design solutions on users findings.
User Empathy
Since we already had a fair idea of the problems we went through as music lovers, it was easier to start off. Like you know, trying to cook our own dog food.
Prototyping & Testing
The features from user interviews prompted me to create an alpha version of Radiohere with Malayalam channels alone. A single language. My mother tongue. And this alpha version was tested among 110 users who were evenly segmented among various personas. I received strong feedback around 85 users. The best responses came from the office going crowd, a segment I deeply focus on nowadays.
Insights
- Listening to a great song unexpectedly was profound, and serendipity spreads happiness
- Everyone loved to listen to radio at their office!
- And the fact that they were listening to it for many hours a day was truly inspiring to take this further!
Design:
I love minimalism. I don’t have to say. It’s been my life and my mission for the last many years.
All the feedback received from the alpha version were incorporated to create a much better launch version. These were the specific things that I focused on.
- Brought out my best in visual design and user experience to create something heartfelt and endearing.
- Added controls with simple keyboard shortcuts on the top of the page for the desktop version. And at the bottom for mobile. This improved the experience at least 3X better (from later google analytics clicks).
- Implemented a list view for radio stations to easily discover and switch between the best ones in India for a particular language. This helped a lot with SEO later.
- Maintained great codecs and standards that enable us to stream really fast on shaky connections, without losing on listening experience.
- Works on all even the crappiest devices in India. The reach is immense!
- Made sure that the latency is really low, which means no buffering delays; plus fast loading of the pages too.
- Responsive page design: Standard experience across all devices, auto aligning of buttons.
- Lively page moments during page loading and hovering are added to bring out the essence of interaction design.
And we finally came up with: Radiohere.com
