I led the paid membership user experience (subscriptions and payments) at Disney+ Hotstar – India's biggest video-on-demand platform with 350 M+ active users (1 in 3 people in India with access to the internet, are on Hotstar).

I joined Hotstar in December 2017 as a Product Designer in a 3 people design team. Since then, till the end of my stint in June 2019, Hotstar grew a lot and I feel proud and honored for the opportunity to create an impact on hundreds of millions of users.

Initially, when the team was super small, I was owning the ads, hiring, design ops, and core app + web experiences including the implementation of a new platform-specific design language and revamp. Eventually, I led subscription and payments experience – where I co-created many improved experiences for our users with the engineering, analytics, and marketing teams resulting in a 7x growth in total paid subscriptions in just 1 year – with the biggest speed altitude recorded in Hotstar's history.

Improving subscription and payments experience for millions

Disney+ Hotstar is also India's biggest subscription product.

Challenges

The three biggest challenges that hampered paid subscription growth for us were –

To solve the first, as a part of MVP I ensured that the communication is consistent across all touch-points and further introduced detailed landing pages for the most popular plans and designed upsell opportunities within the app.

To mitigate funnel leaks, I focussed on improving all the existing payment flows by storyboarding and understanding user pain points per platform.

Another big detail was to make the experience less transactional and more human with better communication and visuals.

To reduce the cancellation post major sports events, many interesting steps were taken, for e.g. introducing upgrade flow to upgrade from sports to entertainment plan, promotion of yearly plan, and discovery of Hotstar Premium content.

With the business and content team, I worked together on the proposal of a new subscription plan called "Hotstar VIP" – a combination of sports plan with top Indian content.

Our scalable subscription design system enabled the business team to go live with this new offering quickly before IPL in a matter of 1 month with a very good success rate.

My unique contribution

1. Designed many upsell entry points to subscription experience in the product to improve subscriptions and encourage plan upgrades. The success rate in the first few months after launch was 85%.
2. Identified the most critical improvement areas and quick-wins in the end to end subscription journey with a PM. Looked at subscriptions holistically while focusing on relentless improvements and optimization in the existing subscription user experience.
3. Revamped subscription pages improving CTR by 75%. Conducted funnel analysis, usability tests and A/B tests and re-iterated most payment flows per method type like Netbanking, Credit card, Debit card, PhonePe, Paytm, and more with success rates improving by 2x to 3x.
4. Enabled the product launch of a brand new subscription plan "Hotstar VIP" from conception to production within 30 days – which became the fastest-selling and biggest subscription plan for Hotstar. We introduced powerful entry points to educate users about Hotstar VIP content and made the proposition value clear and exciting for our users with the landing page.
5. Collaborated with multiple teams such as design ops, marketing, sports, and content to level up the overall experience and took ownership to maintain the highest quality of shipping.

Snippets:

The new landing page designed to raise awareness about the offerings of Hotstar Premium showcasing the diverse content catalog of Hotstar, member-only benefits, value proposition, and FAQs. There was a 75% improvement in CTR after the introduction of this page.

Behind the scenes:

Process outline:

• Learning from Mixpanel, Hotjar, and funnel analysis

• Storyboarding
• Competitive Analysis
• Subscription Interaction Paradigms
• Freemium interaction paradigms
• Bigger picture analysis for subscriptions: Activation, Acquisition, Retention
• Business Analysis
• Persona/Target user analysis
• Analysis of freemium features and businesses
• User interviews
• Design audits – ecosystem mapping, consistency, and quality
• Stakeholder interviews, Goal setting
• Design explorations, converging, iterating
• Tone of voice. Transitioning from "Subscriptions" to "Membership"|
• Roadmapping payment and subscription improvements
• Setting up success metrics
• Execution and QA
• A/B testing - Scalable design components
• Executive leadership presentations