The Collaboration

Lokal is a news and classifieds app aimed at tier 2 and tier 3 audiences. It brings regional language news and caters specifically to news, matrimonial, classifieds and jobs from within a district . Onething collaborated with Lokal to build a platform that allows people to consume and contribute to hyper local information.

Industry

Media

Platform

Services

UX Research | UX Design | Visual Design

Award

Link

Website/App

Link

Problem Definition

How can we build an app for people who are not the most tech-savvy, while featuring a diverse feature-set ranging from media, to property leasing, to e-commerce.

The process we followed

Discovery Workshop & Research
Secondary Research
Information Architecture
Wireframes
Visual Designs
Prototyping
Design System & Handover

Opportunities discovered

Designing for the Undesigned

With Lokal, we were looking specifically at those from a tier-2/3 city background. Some of these individuals had very little experience working with apps in the past, so the experience had to be malleable enough to suit their needs, while still being comprehensible to the tech-literate users.

Many Features, One App

Lokal app featured a wealth of features, from property leasing, to news & media, to mobile commerce. Balancing the information architecture with this depth of features without losing out on discoverability of any one function.

Language Barrier

The audiences were exclusively Tamil and Telugu language speakers. To overcome this problem we had to onboard a translation partner, however, that posed its own challenge, as few terms cannot be translated from English/Hindi to vernacular languages.

UI Considerations

The UI could not be overhauled as when Lokal approached us, they already had a large, active user base which were used-to the look and feel of the app. We had to act within guidelines when building the interface of the app.

the EXPERIENCE we created

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Building a visual direction for Lokal involved experimenting with bold colours and typography, which could appeal to people of all backgrounds, and levels of experience with technology. It had to be catchy while not distracting from the functionality of the app.