Guvera was an ad-funded and subscription based music streaming service, homegrown in Australia, with 14+ million users across 8 countries.
As Head of Design, I directed the entire design process for the Guvera Mobile, Tablet and Web products. In my role, I collaborated daily with the CTO, Head of Product and Product Development Lead as well as project managing a small team of designers, developers and testers to deliver a final product to market. During the products lifespan we were constantly re-defining features and exploring new ideas to improve the platform.
Guvera’s core user experience and interface revolved around discovery, recommendations and building up your taste profile. These three pillars defined the foundation that we layered brand engagement on top of. During the design process and product iterations we thought of Guvera as an ecosystem that should serve both music enthusiasts and brands.
Thorough user testing of multiple navigation systems allowed us to vet the best solution to guide the user to their desired content. We introduced 'Pick up where you left off' and personalised music channels based on taste profile to allow users to easily play their favourite music or to discover more of what they love.
The Guvera music player picked average colours from the album artwork. To make sure the text and icons were always visible we levelled out each of the RGB values to a minimum. ie. RGB (10, 100, 100) as the minimum was 50 it would end up as RBG (50, 100, 100).
Early stage product research revealed that 90% of users didn't want to pay for their music so by creating branded experiences, we were able to attract a wider audience all while maintaining a fully featured offering, free of charge.
We created various ways to integrate native branding directly into the product, developing layouts for standard and premium ads as well as sponsored content that felt like natural extensions of, and partnerships with, the Guvera brand rather than distractions from the experience. This was accomplished through curated playlists, video content, articles and custom brand channels.