June
June is an all-in-one social media super app that is targeted mainly in the rural areas of India.
June is the next generation social media application targeted towards the rural people in India having the multilingual capability. It will be an all-in-one app where users can chat, view/add posts, and even do monetary transactions in one single application.
Social media and Fintech
1 Designer, 2 Manager(s)
No (Bootstrapped)
Product design
In-progress (Estd release Jul 2021)
Android, iOS
Rural people in India are usually not much into social media nor use the digital way for having monetary transactions. They use the chat application for communication purposes but they don’t really use it to the fullest and take advantage of available resources.
I had a workshop with the founding team to know their thought on the product before talking to the target audience. Here I found that gap on what has to be addressed to get the users onboard. Then to understand the core issues I started digging deeper by interviewing many users of different categories and age groups mostly from rural areas and some from cities and urban areas.
I have been using WhatsApp for some time and I am still figuring out on how to use it effectively.
I know about Facebook but it looks too complex for me to understand but I had used Tiktok before the app ban which had a friendly interface. It would be better if the app is simple and more friendly for users like me.
I don’t believe in digital transactions because of fraudulent activities I heard from others.
- Rural user (45, Male)
I am active on social media, especially on Instagram. I am a bit bothered by the privacy issues, rest everything is fine for me.
When it comes to digital monetary transactions I do use it but not regularly.
- Rural user (22, Female)
I use WhatsApp as the communication medium and I’m more active on social media, I am concerned about my privacy after hearing the recent news. In the future, I would love to try apps that are designed specifically for the Indian market needs which also support user privacy.
- Urban user(33, Male)
Here I came up with personas that serve as a cumulative representation of different age groups between 12-65 for both men and women of rural, urban and city areas having different needs, goals and pain points which I derived during the contextual inquiry.
Male | 20 years | Bachelors
Behavior:
Female | 35 years | Beautician
Behavior:
Men | 40 years | Masters degree
Behavior:
Men | 64 years | Bachelors
Behavior:
Based on the contextual inquiry and feedback from the participants I came to know the likes and dislikes of the participants. Some of them are listed below:
After the research and knowing the IA, I started planning the flow by considering different types of users involved and on most widely used features by them. Since it is an MVP release, our team decided to go with chat, feed and a short video for the first release and kept payments and other financial related elements for the next upcoming releases.
In the beginning, the user has to select the app language and later onboarding is a 2 step process where the user first needs to sign-up using google/apple id and then needs to validate the phone number using OTP.
Once after signing-up, the user can sync contacts to start the conversation, the users can also be found by their global user ID.
Here the user can have a group chat or individual chat and also can initiate audio/video calls.
Providing this feature increases the engagement of the user with the application.
Based on research it is known that short videos are more engaging, so the introduction of this will help in monetizing the app.
Once after creating the Lo-Fi wireframes, I have done the dry run myself before having a walkthrough with the users to get their feedback.
Here it’s more about the visual experience and the interactions for which I had the same set of users for testing so that they can get an idea of the look and feel of the application and on how it will impact the users. After getting the feedback it was shown to the stakeholders of the company.
Concentrate more on the experience where users stay longer. Eg: Experience matters the most for the commenting screen than for reporting.
Keep the design as minimalistic as possible without cluttering the screen.
