What

Named after the author of the Iliad, Homer is an audio storytelling app that features immersive audio drama, documentaries, poetry, long and short form fiction & non-fiction stories in episodes and series.

Two months into the journey, we realised we made so many mistakes as any first time founder would. Two of which was finding content fit for purpose and product-market fit, which its core problem was the way the product was designed.

We attempted to solve the problem in three different ways

1. Redesign the entire app
2. Educate the users on how to use the app
3. Create engaging content to attract users to the app

We choose to go with options 2 and 3. In creating engaging content, we ended up creating a media company that would feed the app with content. All these we did ourselves and paid some freelancers to help with sound design and immersive soundscapes based on the vision of the business.

However, things took a slight turn, we were totally enganged by producing amazing immersive audio stories while having fun. We had to postpone the app redesign and focus on getting the media company functioning. 

Back to the app. As curious founders, we actually decided to speak to our customers/listeners about what they like, what’s working for them and what kind of content they would like to listen to.

From our findings, we found out the user pain-points below:

1. Users also wanted to hear the stories on other platforms

2. Professional writers wanted a way to collaborate on the app and make us publish

3. It was difficult for us to find content as lots of writers didn’t want to part with their content without worthy compensation 

4. Users wanted stories in different categories; sleep, gym, motivation, documentary style stories and it was getting difficult to fulfil these demands

5. Our freelancers were positively pushing for cross-collaboration

6. It became more expensive to create high quality immersive stories and our listeners were noticing.

7. Users wanted trendy and recent content based on current society happenings, which birthed current affairs type of storytelling.

8. Users wanted USG content (user generated content)and were coming to us with their stories

As we found all these issues, we could’t keep up with the demands and would have meant re-jigging our entire business model, which we didn’t have the finance for. We decided to stick to the media company. At the moment, we have 1000+ freelance creatives across Africa and have produced more stories.

However, getting into product design has made me rethink the whole app redesign process to fit the new business model.

Harnessing my skill as a product designer, I thought of redesigning the app to a high-level prototype as a solution to all our user pain-points and include opportunities to make the app more appealing to use. This includes adding some differentiation features to make Homer stand out from Spotify, Apple Music and Soundcloud and the likes.

I intened to also use this project to showcase my UI capabilities. This is still an ongoing project, but a user journey which I designed can be seen below.