Background

Cizoo is a karaoke app allowing you to sing always in tune: http://www.cizoo.io/appstore
It has 550 000 users and worked with clients like Adidas, Chanel or Heineken

I am a Cofounder and was Cizoo's CPO during 5 years, during which I managed to make it grow from 0 to 300 000 users on iOS. Kevin worked with me on the redesign and UX/UI.

Problem

The app had a Snapchat like menu which was focused on the content creation. The main feature of the app was the karaoke creation mode. Once your video created, you would be directed to the Public Feed. The activation rates were good but the majority of the users would miss the social aspect of the app (only 30% of our users would visit the Public Feed).

How to increase our retention rate and the Public Feed usage without decreasing the use of the main feature of the app?

Methodology

What we did :

• Defined thoroughly our objectives and prioritized them

• Made a benchmark of similar apps

• Sketched our ideas and tested them quickly with Marvell App

• Tested the best ideas on friends & family

• Wireframed, tested again and designed the screens of the 3 best concepts

• Tested those concepts with InVision on more than 20 people that did not know the app, that we found wandering in Gare de Lyon talking to people waiting for their train

Solution

We managed to simplify the process while adding a subtle complexity to reach a valuable solution:

• Using a Bottom Menu with the Public Feed as a default page

• On the first connection, a tutorial (already built in the app) would open to invite you to create a video

• The logo used for the Karaoke icon is central and bigger than the other ones to incite you to create a video

We also believed that by watching the Public Feed you would be inspired to create a video too by watching others doing cool ones.

Results

The retention rate of the app improved by 32%. The users spent more and more time watching the videos of others, which in turn inspired them to make more videos.
This allowed us to reach 40 000 downloads per month and to be ranked as the third music app in the French AppStore, above Spotify.