Building a mobile app and brand for a streaming platform

In 2015, most smartphone users in India were on slow 2G and 3G networks. Streaming a film meant waiting for it to buffer, again and again. That was especially true outside the big cities.

Fastfilmz wanted to change that. The startup had the India licence for V-Nova’s Perseus video compression, which made HD streaming possible on slow networks. Its audience was movie fans in India’s smaller cities, many of them watching regional films.

I joined as Product Design Lead. My work came in two parts. First I created the brand. Then, after the first app launched, I led the redesign of the app for iOS and Android.

I worked remotely from New Zealand with the Chief Design Officer, who was based in India. We brought in a contractor when we needed extra hands.

• I did most of the hands-on design work: the brand identity, research synthesis, structure, flows, screens and handover to developers.
• I ran design workshops with developers and stakeholders, and travelled to India for in-person sessions when needed.
• The Chief Design Officer managed stakeholders, gave presentations and shaped the marketing strategy. We brainstormed and set the direction together.

Fastfilmz focused on regional Indian films, especially from South India. That’s where I grew up. I knew the movie culture well: the celebrations, the colour, and the way fans treat their stars like heroes.

So the brief I set myself was three words: fast, colourful and local. I sketched on paper and in Illustrator. Film strips, play buttons, cheetahs, arrows. Some ideas were fine, but none of them felt like they belonged to the audience.

The spintop

Then I found it: the spintop, or pambaram. It’s a colourful wooden toy that my friends and I played with for hours in the 90s. It spins fast, it’s full of colour, and almost everyone in South India knows it. It was fast, colourful and local, all in one shape.

The colours in the spintop start with the brand colour at the top and move through the spectrum to blue at the base. They stand for the variety of films in the catalogue. The symbol is tilted 15 degrees, so it always looks like it’s spinning. The bold wordmark gives the brand a strong presence next to it.

A colour from a local flower

For the main brand colour, I picked a medium violet-red based on the vadamalli flower, also known as globe amaranth. It grows everywhere in the region, and it’s used to decorate stages at weddings and celebrations.

Brand guidelines set out how to use the logo, colours and icon, so they looked the same everywhere.

Taking it to market

The brand came to life in ad campaigns, posters and billboards, in the same bold, colourful style as South Indian film posters.

After the first version of the app launched, we brought in an agency to run user surveys and in-depth research. We wanted to understand why people used the app, and what got in their way.

The findings were clear. People liked the app’s structure. What held it back was how it looked, how hard it was to find good content, and how little content there was.

So the brief for the redesign was to keep what worked, and make the app feel as exciting as the films in it. It needed a fresh look, clearer interactions and better recommendations, while staying simple.

We ran brainstorming sessions and workshops to turn the research into a new direction. Two big ideas came out of it.

From these ideas, we set visual and experience principles for every screen. Full-screen images on black. Posters made from memorable scenes. One long page for each film. A cleaner home screen with recommendations.

The films were what people paid for, so we put them first. Instead of a menu, the home screen offered stars, movies, scenes and songs over a full-screen poster. People could find films by star, director, genre or what was trending, through several paths instead of one.

For every feature, I wrote user stories, broke down each screen, and defined the logic and flows. Developers knew exactly how each part should behave.

I also mapped the whole app so developers could see how every screen connected.

I designed every screen for iOS and Android, and kept them consistent with a UI kit. I handed the designs over in Zeplin, with specs and assets, and reviewed the builds with developers.

Within two months of launch, Fastfilmz became one of the top-rated movie apps on Google Play.

The brand grew with the app. With the redesign, we refined the logo with a lighter wordmark to match the cleaner look.

The best idea came from my own childhood, not from what other apps were doing. Knowing your audience’s culture can give you ideas no amount of desk research will.

This was also where I learned to lead design from start to finish. Brand, research, structure, screens and handover, plus working closely with marketing so the brand and the product told the same story.