ShareChat Explore Page — ReDesign
I’m not affiliated with ShareChat in any capacity, and the views for this case study are strictly my own. This case study is not entirely comprehensive because I do not have complete access to all the user data that inspired their current design. This case study was done to enhance my learning experience and to challenge myself to redesign it for a specific purpose.
Why Redesign?
As I was applying for internships I got a task to redesign a page for an app. I prefer reading on my mobile phone, so I even decided to download the app. Even, I faced a lot of trouble navigating through it and finding relevant items despite being familiar with complex interfaces and features. I didn’t find any of my favorite categories or related articles.
To be honest, I was very unsatisfied with the UI of ShareChat starting from several failed button clicks to alignment issues. In all, I found that the whole UI could’ve been a lot more user friendly. All the observations are from a user point of view. I am 100% sure, that a redesign would help the app grow significantly much better than before.
Summary
The task assigned to me in an assignment was to re-design the explore page. One can easily get videos, pictures, etc on ShareChat. UI of ShareChat can be made better, it can be made user friendly. There are few buttons which can be added or re-designed.
For the convenience of the user, ShareChat is available in any Indian regional language. I haven’t found an option for the English language. Or the regional language used was a combination of regional + English that would lead to confusion for users.
Going Through the Reviews
I started looking for reviews on the Play Store. There weren’t many downloads of the app (100M+). There were few reviews which helped me to solve users’ problem. I even went through some reviews of the competing new apps (with 100M+ downloads) to know their best features, attracting and retaining their users.
Pain Points / Challenge
It was a big challenge for me to redesign the project. So I started by taking baby steps first, from doing research about ShareChat and gathering information.
Then I sorted the gathered information and identified the problems. It also helped me in understanding the user perspective of what exactly they wanted.
Below are a few issues I discovered when I did some research of my own:
· Search Engine bar unnecessarily too big
· No button to filter out contents according to the user’s choice
· Suggestions need clean UI
· Colour Code for similar groups to avoid confusion
· Alternate name for word “Khajana” i.e. Explore/Discovery
· Accidental touch between “Join the group” and “Chat Room”
· Instead of showing groups in a list form, cards can be used to make it more manageable and user friendly
· Highlight only that icon which in use.
Suggestions / Redesign
Affinity Mapping
Next, I compiled all the feedback, insights, and pain points listed above and grouped similar ones. This helped me brainstorm and develop potential ideas and gave a clearer view of what was important to users while keeping in mind the business goals and objectives.
Paper Sketches
For paper wireframes, I carefully went through the UI of ShareChat App. After making some observations, I sketched out all the possible layout and finally came out with the one that worked the best. This allowed me to prototype solutions for the main screens before committing to high fidelity designs.
Conclusion
I was a bit tense at first, as I knew this would be a lot of work. But I knew this was the best opportunity to improve my design skills.
Looking back on the whole process, redesigning this app and working on this case study taught me that users are still the core of any design decision and that the smallest thing can have an effect, such as altering the structure of an element. The process of learning is constant.
So that was the redesign I have done on ShareChat. Hope you found it interesting and useful.
And that’s a wrap. Thank you for reading!
