Optimizing user experience: ShemarooMe's success with DevRev

The company

Shemaroo Entertainment Ltd is an India-based media giant, boasting a legacy of over 60 years. Its award-winning Over The Top (OTT) media platform, ShemarooMe, offer users a rich collection spanning Bollywood movies, web series, and popular regional music. With its mobile apps, Shemaroo continues to deliver exceptional entertainment to millions of subscribers in India and beyond — amassing loyal fans across 150+ countries.

The challenge

Over the past 7 years, mobile content consumption has skyrocketed in India. A bulk of this boom was due to tailwinds from cheaper smartphones and 4G data. ShemarooMe could seize the opportunity to become one of the largest OTT service providers. But the OTT space has fierce competition today.

Every player in the industry works hard to boost user retention, engagement, and conversions. To see real improvements in these key growth areas, providing the best user experience is essential.

Understanding this, ShemarooMe was well aware of changing user expectations. Their main concern was the need for more insights into how users interact with their mobile apps. This resulted in:

A lack of user monitoring

ShemarooMe consistently implements weekly updates, focusing on UI/UX enhancements and resolving issues. The team, however, confronts a notable challenge: establishing an effective method to monitor and assess the impact of these updates on their users. They needed help gauging whether these changes improve the user experience or inadvertently create new issues, highlighting a need for a more refined tracking process.

Understanding user pain points

The product managers recognized that there were better ways to learn about poor user experiences than waiting for negative product reviews. They sought a proactive approach to identify and address user pain points. The PMs aimed to enhance various user journeys, optimize UI/UX, efficiently troubleshoot crashes, and effectively replicate and resolve any noticeable issues before they escalate to negative feedback.

The solution

Following a thorough evaluation of various tools, ShemarooMe chose DevRev for its comprehensive features. DevRev met all their needs, offering issue reproduction, UX analysis, heatmaps, and funnel analysis. A key factor in their decision was DevRev's efficient, bloat-free SDK. Additionally, the excellent support from DevRev's customer success team, who have been consistently helpful, played a significant role in their choice.

Setting up a continuous optimization process

At ShemarooMe, every major update is closely monitored using DevRev PLuG, a proven effective practice in identifying and fixing numerous issues. For instance, after updating the video-playing control feature, the team noticed through PLuG that users struggled to locate the control buttons. Reacting swiftly, the team reverted to the previous control UI, incorporating only minor changes. This agile approach enables the team to deliver and uphold a high-quality user experience consistently.

Analyzing issues beyond metrics

Drop-offs, crashes, and logs are typical challenges, but DevRev's PLuG uniquely connects these elements to provide a comprehensive view of issues. ShemarooMe utilized this feature to reproduce user complaints for their support and development teams accurately. Additionally, their marketing team leveraged it to analyze user interactions with various screens and banners, gaining valuable insights into the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The Impact

DevRev’s Session 360 and User 360 data brought deep insight into user interactions and engagement that helped ShemarooMe optimize its apps.

Here are the outcomes in brief:

4x Faster issue resolution

ShemarooMe streamlined its issue resolution process by shifting its focus from user feedback to using session recordings. These recordings provided detailed insights into user interactions, allowing the team to identify and replicate issues precisely. This change in approach led to quicker and more accurate problem-solving, as the team could directly observe and understand the user's experience, enhancing their ability to debug and resolve issues effectively.

2x Faster UI improvements

ShemarooMe experienced at least a doubling in the rate of their UI updates. This improvement was due to more informed design decisions guided by clearer insights. Additionally, they established a method to accurately measure the impact of these changes, leading to more effective and data-driven UI enhancements.