With the emergence of Live and Social commerce Myntra launches their new initiative 'mLive' , which began in July 2021. {insert Picture}. The initiative was amalgamation of various elements of New Media like influencer marketing, live streaming and Ecommerce. The end result was live streaming platform baked into the Myntra app that enabled customers to buy products being showcased in live sessions hosted by their favourite influencer. Not only this but they had concurrent streams going on at the same time that you can compare to 'channels' you see on Television.
This what the Myntra Studio home screens looks like - as you can see there are channels that users can tune into.
Users can purchase the products worn by the influencer from the tray below
The initiative demanded tons of attention of not just the influencer but also the galleri5 Operations team that was tasked with a plethora of duties which ranged from onboarding of influencers to follow ups and performance measurement. Each live sessions required a lot of exchange of information from both sides. All of duties and exchange of information were being tracked and executed via Sheets or over Whatsapp, which is not scalable.
So the task at hand for the Tech and Design team was to create 2 apps, one for the influencer and one for the g5 Operations Team to facilitate the exchange of information and tracking of tasks for both sides. This Project specifically covers the influencer side of this Challenge. So galleri5 opted to develop a web based application that aided in Scheduling and Tracking of mLive sessions that would be used by influencers who for this project overview will be referred to as 'Users'.
The first step was actually understanding how a live was conducted. The process in it's essence was nothing more than an exchange of information. We can break the tasks into three types Operations Task , Influencer Task and the rarer Combined Task .
The general layout was determined via this lo-fi Prototype, we wanted the the user to achieve their tasks in the fewest steps possible. This meant having a simple layout that saved the influencer time and energy. While the layout was simple, the routing had to be reiterated on since V1 of the app was not going to have all the features as initially planned.
During the first iteration, there was still a lot of work to be done in terms of the actual process. So at the time the stakeholder just wanted a visual representation of what the app would look like. In a span of 24 hours post the lo fi prototype, we were able to come up with the below flow. The final flows used this as the foundation and the team had shared the first round of feedback at this point.
The initial designs did not even include a home screen or a performance tab, the general consensus was that visually, the app was lacking. So I dove back in to make a it a better user experience by using the feedback I had gotten from the team
Over the coming weeks as I learned about the process more and the features were getting more definite, the final design was starting to take shape. There are several learnings and changes that happened at this point too, I will cover that at the end of this overview.
Apart from actually designing, the team leader helped me understand some of how the backend works. This project help me understand the marriage between frontend development and backend development. The operations team share a sheet which consisted of all the information that made a deliverable, the tech team made data structures around that after which they explained the data structure of certain pages to me to help me make screens.
During the pre release of the app I also did a fair bit of manual testing. I made a comprehensive log of bugs or changes I felt could impact the app. I had made a log of it, but unfortunately the log was lost.