Hoichoi TV: Video Streaming Product Analysis & Redesign
I have been a fan of Byomkesh Bakshi, an Indian-Bengali fictional detective created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay since my teenage years. I have read all the story and love every single one of them. When I got to know that there is a new TV series at Hoichoi, I couldn’t contain my fanboy excitement.
Oh wait… What is Hoichoi TV?
Hoichoi is an international Bengali language content-only subscription video-on-demand and OTT streaming service platform from West Bengal.
Let’s continue again…
I googled it up and saw it was streaming on Hoichoi. What delighted me was that the first episode was completely FREE to watch! I did not have to pay a single penny. Moreover, Anirban Bhattacharya’s sublime acting made me want to see the whole series. And that is the beginning of how I became a user of Hoichoi TV. The TV series ‘Byomkesh’ and other free content amazed me. The sheer variety of quality TV series and movies is truly commendable. But what has left me disappointed as a user(and a product designer) was the user experience of the site. The users of a platform with so much good stuff and potential should not have to deal with baffling pricing page, homepage and searching. Below are my thoughts on how they could significantly improve to convert users into potential customers and also retain the existing ones.
Disclaimer: I’m Shoaib Mahmud, Product Designer based in Bangladesh. I don’t work for Hoichoi and don’t have any insider data or information. So the suggestions I made are purely from my own using experience.
First time experience of the homepage 👋
I landed straight on the Byomkesh TV series page. After watching the first episode I decided to browse what else they had to offer so I went to the homepage.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Hoichoi allowed me to view all the content that was available. Big thumbs up to them for not gatekeeping their content like other competitors. I’m sure it helps in their user activation. Now looking at the user interface of the homepage, what hit me was the banner at the top. “Is it static?” I asked myself. After closer inspection, I saw there was a slider below and the banners are actually clickable.
Also, I could actually view the trailer If I clicked on the banner. Why not just auto play one to let me know?
While I’m on the topic of banners, the thumbnails also did not look anything like we see on other OTTs. They kind of looked like book covers. Browsing further, I observed that the top navigation bar is unresponsive.
Changing text color/Underlining text/Adding hover effect could easily solve this accessibility issue. Something that also bugged me was the language selection option. Problem: If a user doesn’t know English, how can they understand? Simply writing “বাংলা” instead of Bengali would solve this.
“Accessibility is not about designing for the few. It is designing for us all.” — Paul Boag
A well targeted and meaningful CTA could be the make or break moment in user activation. What Hoichoi offers here is just plain confusing.
Remember I watched an episode of Byomkesh for free? Back then I had to login using either phone/email. But I did not have an account before so how did I log in? Well first of all, kudos to Hoichoi for letting me create a free account. The catch here is what they mean by ‘log in’ is basically sign up. If you sign up(or log in according to Hoichoi), you can view free episodes, add shows to your watchlist and check history. But as a first time user, I did not know any of that. If they don’t let me know the benefits of creating a free account then why should I in the first place?
Simply renaming ‘Sign up’ to ‘Create a free account’ would work. Renaming these CTAs would go a long way to prevent confusion among users.
Even after all these hiccups I decided to sign up because I wanted to see the next seasons of Byomkesh and also found the available content very compelling. Kudos to Hoichoi for offering such strong content.
Fun fact: In 2019, Netflix spent a total of 15.3 billion US dollars on video content, with over 80 percent of that allocated to original content production (Source: Statista)
A fresh redesign of the homepage. At first glance, we can see the stillness feeling of the homepage is gone. In place, a hero section where the trailer of the show/movie auto plays. Users can choose to pause/mute it if they want. A button ‘এখন দেখুন’(watch now) has been added to let the users know that they can access viewing it here. A smooth transitioning slider has also been added to replace the inaccessible old one. The thumbnails of the slider now look like actual shows as they are now in landscape rather than portrait.
The top navigation bar has been fine-tuned using proper microcopy and highlighting. The navigation links responds to hover as they change color and a horizontal bar appears on top making it accessible to all users. Proper microcopy has cleared the confusion too. The selected language is written in a way that is understandable.
The two main CTAs, firstly ‘লগ ইন/সাইন আপ’(login/sign up) has been renamed to ‘লগইন / ফ্রি একাউন্ট খুলুন’(login/create a free account). And the second one ‘সাবস্ক্রাইব করুন’(Subscribe) has been highlighted with an icon to divert user’s attention as it is the primary goal of the homepage. Making small changes like these will go a long way to increase user activation surely.
But it was naive of me to think that the stumbling blocks were over. Rather, I had to witness the biggest blunders of Hoichoi’s user journey. Moving on…
#2 Subscribing and Pricing 💸
I clicked subscribe now and got hit by this…
I can’t emphasize enough how critical it is for such platforms to nail their pricing sites. Without a doubt, what Hoichoi has here is significantly affecting their conversion rates. The benefits are not adequately mentioned on the pricing cards. Both options appear to be the same. There is no emphasis on one of them or one chosen as the default to make the user’s choice easier. This page’s bounce rate is likely to be very high (this is a guess as I don’t have insider data.
I’ve taken inspiration from Disney Hotstar, who implemented this amazingly! Enough context has now been provided for the user to make a sensible choice. While huge corporations can afford costly price research, simple psychology can be used to make persuasive pricing pages. That is what I exactly did here.
- Adding Social Proof — Standing out most Popular option”
The tendency of human beings to follow the actions of others when making decisions, placing weight on these actions to assume “the correct decision.” Social proof can be used to deliver credibility to prospective users and promote.
- Showing Prices in Small Fonts:
Generally, you should display prices in a small font so that they seem numerically smaller (Coulter & Coulter, 2005).
- Position Prices Near the Left: Prices appear to be lower in various regions, particularly on the left.
…because our eyes enter a visual field from the left, the left naturally becomes the anchor point or ‘visual fulcrum.’ Thus, the further an object is placed away from the left side (or the fulcrum), the heavier the perceived weight (Deng & Kahn, 2009, p. 9).
- Placing a Larger Number on the Left:
Place the original price (the larger number) on the left. It’s called the subtraction principle: Customers can subtract these numbers more easily, which makes the difference seem larger (Biswas et al., 2013)
- Show Higher Prices Before Lower Prices: Customers are more likely to choose an expensive option when you sort prices from high to low. Over an 8-week span, researchers alternated beer prices on a menu. They maximized revenue when prices were sorted from highest to lowest (Suk, Lee, & Lichtenstein, 2012).
Apart from these psychology hacks, I provided the user with a proper value proposition with the pricing cards. The benefits have been clearly mentioned for the two categories. A third option ‘Standard for ৳299/ 6 months has been added to trigger ‘Centre Stage Effect (or the Middle Option Bias)’. Users will be persuaded to choose either the ‘popular’ middle one or ‘standard yearly’ as the price now scales evenly. All of the above tweaks will no doubt increase conversion for Hoichoi.
#3 Content Cards 🤦♂️
After a lot of struggle and confusion, I managed to subscribe to the 1 year, 4 device plan for BDT599. Coming back to the homepage again, the thumbnail of a show caught my attention. I hovered my mouse over it and saw this ‘+’ button.
Out of curiosity I clicked but it was unresponsive.(It actually adds the show/movie to your watchlist which I found out later. A simple tooltip could have worked) Other questions regarding the thumbnail that clouded my mind were -
- Whether it was a tv show or a movie?
- Will the trailer play or will it take me to a screen with the full show.
Furthermore, the ‘play’ icon was hardly visible over the thumbnail.
The content cards have been completely redesigned. The trailer now auto-plays when users hover over them. The subtext clearly states the content type(tv series), genre(comedy) and production(Hoichoi originals). The play icon has been made more prominent with a red fill. These changes leave no room for confusion and ensure the user gets context before clicking on them.
#4 Searching 🔍
I found the searching feature of Hoichoi very frustrating. Firstly, the search icon is hard to find since it does not have any text labels.
Secondly, after clicking the search icon, a pop-up appeared with the search input where the input field label and placeholder text both say “এখানে টাইপ করুন”(meaning — type here).
Input field labels tell users what information belongs in a given form field. But here it is not serving any purpose in my opinion. The extra-label is not needed. And about the placeholder, it should guide users on what they might type. For example: “Search TV Shows, Movies” etc.
With some minor fixes, the search modal can be improved manifold. Firstly, proper input placeholder text which guides the user in searching the right thing. Also, popular search has been added for quick access and to reduce the paradox of choice for users.
I have also added suggestions while typing. Currently in Hoichoi’s search, the search input spelling has to be very accurate. I have solved this by making contents appear while typing and also suggesting possible results the user might be looking for. Now it is easy to find the desired content while also preventing errors.
After pressing ‘enter’ the search results appear in two horizontal rows. It cleverly divides the content into two categories. Even if the content the user is looking for does not exist, suggesting something similar makes sure the user does not feel disappointed. A similar movie or TV series might peak their interest.
#5 Lack of Personalization 🔍
According to Netflix’s research — “Eighty percent of what you watch on Netflix comes from personalized recommendations.” Netflix also reports that anywhere from 75% to 80% of its revenue is generated through extremely personalized algorithms that keep viewers coming back for more.
We can clearly see how important personalization is for such OTT platforms. Hoichoi can use this immensely powerful feature to increase it’s revenue manifold. At the time of writing, I have used Hoichoi for many weeks but I have yet to receive solid personalized recommendations from it. It has left me as a user searching for content myself through other medias. In the long run, this can be a serious reason of increasing churn rate.
Personalize early and set user expectations from the very first interaction
Use a recovery sequence to nudge your customers into finishing what they’ve started
Using recovery sequences to prompt users to visit their website again, and continue viewing videos after they’ve left something behind.
Getting the right content in front of the right customer at the right time. Hoichoi has a large selection of products, thus it’s crucial to correctly customize their product catalog in two dimensions: groups and rows. Making careful to mix the products in rows to provide them a new experience with each visit and bring up helpful suggestions they may have missed in the past.
How can Hoichoi achieve such feat? Well of course they will have to collect thousands of data points from their users. Hoichoi may use the following information, among others, to make extremely specific product recommendations:
- Information from user profiles (including age, gender, language, location, and self-reported content interests)
- The title and the time the user watched it — The type of streaming device — The viewer’s viewing habits (whether a show was paused, rewound, fast-forwarded)
- How many searches were done, how many different things were searched for, and browsing history
The company’s return on investment(ROI) could increase by these thousands of customer data points because they dramatically increase consumer recommendations, lower churn rates, and ensure customer loyalty.
In conclusion
All of the aforementioned proposals were made out of appreciation for Hoichoi. While I admire what they have to offer in terms of content, improving the user experience would only help them get more users in the future. It was difficult to offer redesigns because I lacked insider data/insight, but even without these, I leveraged my experience as a product designer (and some design psychology) to improve the product. Before I sign off, I’d like to wish Hoichoi the best of luck in the future and hope that it becomes the go-to OTT platform for all Bengali-speaking audiences.
Dear Stranger!
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