 recharge apps and there's an app on the left and the right and the both of them do pretty much the same thing they have they help you recharge tell you about offers tell you about your usage if you look at it and ask yourself which one of these apps would you rather use you'll probably pick the one on the right and why is that so this app on the right tells you your balance right so you need not ask what balance you have it automatically tells you that without you without you having to do anything and if you're low on balance it has a very helpful bar over there that says you're running out of balance you should probably do a recharge and to make that experience great for you they also say you know what you we have all of these offers that are doing that are going on right now and you should do a recharge right away so what went right over here for the app on the right first fall it identified you it knew who you were and it did not expect you to you know key in your mobile number every time it you know recognize you and it got the information that you required without you asking for it right so if it is a mobile recharge app obviously you will need to know what your talk time is what your balance is and it got it from the server and it started showing it to you without you doing anything it also give you easy access to the most important action that you had to do using the app and that's the recharge so two guiding principles one is timely information the other is important actions so if you have these two things in mind you can you know build a great main activity let's look at some other apps this is one plus service app so it gives you the most important information that is relevant to you it says that your warranty is up to so-and-so date and it tells you that if you need a request if you need to request a service this is the button that you should be pressing very focused this is another app that helps you track the amount of water you're drinking and the main activity is very focused on that goal it says this is how you're doing with the whole process so this is the track this is the thing that you're tracking and you are so much so so far along in the process and it also gives you calls to drink you know more water this is an app that probably a lot of us used to come here today and instead of showing you you know any information about your previous trips or instead of you know telling you where your friends are right now it is focused on doing one thing getting you to book your next ride it so and that is timely it also tells you that there is you know the nearest cab is two minutes away and there's a big fat button in right in the middle that says set pickup location and it has all of the information all of the other filters that you could require if you want to make changes so why is this important so we spend a lot of time and effort you know marketing our app we use a whole lot of processes and we finally get a hard earned app download now what this happens after that is users open your app and the first thing that they see the first impression that you can make is through your main activity if that activity helps you get things done faster for whatever the reason the user has downloaded the app for they'll use you again and again and you can convert them into an active user and you can get the engagement or revenue metrics that you like from them so designing a good main activity is a really crucial task and we set out to do this with the app that I work on sensei we are a TV guide and remote so we help you figure out what's playing on TV right now and so there are tens of thousands of shows playing across several languages and several channels and there's a great content on TV and a lot of us miss it because we simply do not know what's happening on TV and our mission is to get you on top of this information and so that you do not wish miss a show that you should be watching so we set out to build a main activity and throughout this process we followed a set of principles these principles are also applicable if you're a site that has generated content or if you're a media app or even an e-commerce store if you simply have too much to show on your main activity and you're saying that I don't have that one thing and the one action that I can show but there's a lot more you can use these principles to sort of guide how you craft your main activity so we had to help our users figure out what is the best show to watch on TV and the first thing that we did is put a lot of images on the app so we said images are something that convey information to you a lot a lot more faster than text and we put we worked on getting you know images and icons for TV channels for shows for pretty much everything that we have in the app and we put a lot of this and we made a grid of images that said you know what these are the shows that are running on TV and you might want to check them out the next thing that we did we grouped all of these recommendations we grouped all of these TV shows based on specific anchors or pivots and this helped our users browse through this list a lot more faster so if you simply have a group of TV shows you have to do this okay do I like the show probably yes because there is America around but we went a step ahead and we grouped all of these shows based on these pivots and looking at you know these list of recommendations became a lot more easier so you look at a list that says English action movies and you would say oh you know what I'm in the mood for an English action movie right now let me check every English action movie that's on TV right now we put this out for our users to use and we got one overwhelming feedback pretty soon and they said you know what all of this is good anchored groups and all is good and we love the way they're showing it but I want to know what's happening on star movies right now I want to know what movie is playing on my favorite channel and I love what's usually on the show usually on the channel and I want to be you know figuring out what's running and this is something that we figured out which is the way that people were doing the same thing before our app was to think about TV from a set of channels these are my favorite channels and you know these are the channels that I watch and I'm interested in the shows that are running on those channels so we had to keep in mind the set ways of you know doing things and not try to drastically change it but just influence behavior so we said you know what this is your favorite channel list and this is what's happening on this but there are these shows also playing on all of these other channels and you might probably like them and to get a big boost on getting the best shows on TV we asked people to tell us about their interest so we said you have your favorite shows you have your favorite channels you have your favorite actress tell us about them and we'll you know do a great job for you and this is something that people like doing as well it gives them a sense of ownership it says it takes it from the CNC app to my CNC app because it knows about my interest knows about my favorite channels and my favorite actors and whenever something's running it'll you know show them so we had all of this information coming in and we said these are the favorite act you know attributes of all of these people but we also had information on what people were watching and we use this information to get to bring a new bar called trending and this helped us figure out events that would happen on TV so if there was some soap where you know marriage was going to happen or if there was a cricket match that is playing on TV or if there is an event like Oscars that's running on TV these would automatically figure that out and this is really wisdom of the crowd right so all of these individually all of us are contributing all of this information but what what comes out of that data and this is something that we made available to our users and it helped this is something that you know greatly you know guided what people would you know like to watch so we did all of these things and and we had great recommendations so our users knew you know exactly what to watch but there was a missing piece the missing piece was once I figured out what I wanted to watch I wanted to actually get to watching it and this process usually involved searching for the remote thinking about what channel does this actually correspond to and you know keying in those channel numbers and pressing and actually watching that channel and we found that this is something that was a disconnect in the whole process so we invested you know time and effort in building the ability for you to change TV channels right from your mobile so if your phone had IR blaster capability you could just tap on one of these images point to your TV and it would directly change it to directly tune into the channel so this really completed the process of you know you wanting to discover what's on TV or wanting to search for something on TV you you know evaluating among the great shows that are running on TV and you you know figuring out to watch it and actually to watching it and this is something that was important which is you started on this process of discovery you should actually help them complete it in the easiest way possible coming to important actions our users might not always know that they have to do specific things and small not just small pushes saying you know what you might want to do this particular action it's going to be helpful for you this goes a long way to actually getting them to do things that you want so if you figure out that your personalization might not work well with very low data you can have simple buttons or simple triggers saying if you personalize more this app will work a lot better for you and this is very unobtrusive it is in the feed and you can just scroll it right away and you can cancel it if you want but this goes a long way to getting people to do things that you want and because it's in the main activity because it's in the activity that people see every day if it gets a lot of attention the odds of people actually doing that activity is higher so this goes with having timely information you should really think about how your user is using it and the context of people using it so for us when we imagine our users using our app it's in the living room it's probably on an evening or a weekend in the living room in front of the TV and that's when they open the app and they figure out what's happening on TV now when people are doing this and when they've tuned into a particular program the app needs to respond to that and help them answer questions like how long is the program what is there an app related to the program what videos of are there on YouTube related to the program essentially things that people will obviously ask related to that program that information should be got right away so like on the first screen we see that the app on the right got the information of balance without you asking them we should proactively get information that is useful for our users we should not make them you know ask the questions that the phones already should be knowing the answer to so a lot of this is happening and we had to introduce our users to all of these features usually this we expect people to know this from a certain advertisement or from a place or descriptions or from the priming and onboarding that we do as soon as they open the app we say this is the app this are all its features and you know have fun but when people use the app and you know they might not go through all of these processes they might skip the descriptions on the play store and they are suddenly using a feature and they might not know what this feature is about so we found that the best way of making them aware of this feature was just before they used it for the first time just have a pop-up that says hey this is a new feature you've never used it before and this is how it works and this goes a long way in telling them how something works and this makes them a lot more comfortable with using some of the things that we had to you know keep in mind while doing this so we talked about how you know information helps you helps you decide you know what you should be doing and and we talked about how you should be getting this information and showing it to the users you shouldn't be overdoing it look at your main activity and say is this information very crucial for for the main activity or can it be behind a click and you should be careful not to clutter or not to overload the screen when building recommend the systems one common one common mistake is to take to take the favorites of the user too strongly and if someone tells me that I like sports everything that I show is oh you like sports and not nothing else and this is called a fatal bubble effect you take too strongly to the recommendations and thinks the user doesn't like anything else and this is not true so we use a bunch of mechanisms we also try to get the popular shows and show them any ways we also have curated recommendations that we show and we try to reduce this effect while doing all this and there was a talk on dynamic view rendering and things like that so it's important to ensure that while building ranked recommendation systems like this and you know mutating the screen to such an extent based on the user preferences you should not lose predictability so people who use our app develop a mental model of how the app is and they expect the app to work like that and if they don't they lose a sense of control and they are uncomfortable with the app so while doing all this it's also important to adhere by a mental model and say okay this is how the app works and it's going to continue to work and this is the main activity that we ended up thank you so you did say that apart from the users the selections of the favorites you add your own content yeah so how do you know whether the user is responding to the stuff which you are throwing at him apart from his favorites you can so one of the things that you can do is for something that they have subscribed to and that is the part of the thing that they can control so if I say I am following America and I like America so it is expected for you to get American movies the question is beyond that what would you show right so one of the things that we do is we move away from that we say okay what's connected to America so you have America America is usually acts in Hindi movies so you probably like Hindi movies and so we have a bunch of extra recommendations for you to show if you know he is also acted in an English movie we have a bunch of recommendations for you to show so we go around in the neighborhood the other is beyond these beyond the related recommendations we also have the trending thing which shows you if a match is popular it shows you the match anyways so what it gets you is and if there's a popular event running like the Oscars for example we show it to all of our users but it need not be a ranked very high it can be ranked lower so that when they scroll down and look at it they'll find it right but then when they find it and if they then favorite it then we have more information to walk with right and we also have the other thing of if there is not enough favorites if it's not diverse you also brought them to you know tell if they liked it so if you search for a particular channel or a particular actor we say okay do you like this actor I mean you search for it shall I favorite them you know for you automatically so we continuously build this graph of interest so that the recommendations get richer so do you use any tools for such analytics or is it like all but me do you use any tools for such analytics so we've written it ourselves hi so what is sense is monetization what so okay we have so one of the things that we can do and we've not started doing this yet is doing something called promoted shows which is if a show wants to promote itself the way that they can do it right now is only through TV so you know on other channels or on during the ad breaks you get ads for other shows they could do it right here we also have so with you know these programs we tell you what's available on your app so how do I connect mobile to your app so we send what YouTube content is relevant to this what apps are relevant to this what products are relevant to this so if you're watching Chota beam we tell you that there are Chota beam water bottles on you know Flipkart and Amazon that you can probably buy and if you're watching Superman there are these apps that you can buy and affiliate traffic is something that we can go to but we've not focused on monetization so far yes so the other thing that we have is so I told you about a way to change channels so if your phone has an IR blaster you can change channels right away but we also have hardware products for the phones that do not have this capability so we have a hardware product that that is actually the Bluetooth to infrared bridge so you tap on a channel it communicates to the product through Bluetooth and that communicates to your setup boxing switches to that channel thank you hi actually 80% of the usability issues are resolved when we do when we go with paper prototyping so do you use paper prototyping in designing screens so we do prototype the screens on paper yes we absolutely do that and while doing this we also look at analytics and see how you know things are being used so we have fast cycles for all of these things and we make a minor change and we put it out there and with every change we do we have some sort of analytics tracking related to that particular feature and we see how it's being used what is the data source for this do you have like content generators or do you use some kind of API yeah we use there is a provider that