Building India’s biggest online cricket coaching platform

Client / Cricuru
Domain / E- learning / Cricket focused coaching platform
Services rendered / Expert review of existing product and tactical UI fixes for their website

Virendra Sehwag | Founder | Cricuru

Anish Kapoor | CEO | Cricuru

The UX Challenge

  • Cricuru is India’s largest online cricket coaching platform with over 2400+ video lessons from 30+ leading cricketers and is founded by Virender Sehwag and Sanjay Bangar.
  • Cricuru allows players to learn directly from the professionals, unlike a physical academy started by a pro player where they may visit infrequently.
  • Cricuru teaches in 3 phases based on the player level and what their needs are.
  • An AI evaluator gives objective feedback for the player’s game unlike a coach.
  • Players can learn how to cultivate a winner’s mindset from other international professionals.

Cricuru partnered with ZEUX for reviewing their current website to improve on their user experience based on the issues highlighted in the UX review, provide tactical recommendations and fixes.

Methodology

  • Competitive Benchmarking
  • User Segmentation
  • Google Analytics data review to identify bottlenecks
  • Navigation – Content – Presentation – Persuasion – Interaction breakdown of Cricuru’s web experience and offerings
  • Restructuring the pricing for subscription plans on the platform to increase active users and create an immersive experience to consume Cricuru content

Based on stakeholder interviews, best practices and expert review, we were able to identify the core problem areas in the existing design…

  • Missing value proposition: Cricuru as a platform makes cricket coaching accessible to millions of Indian households across all socio-economic classes. It provides expert generated content to facilitate online coaching. The interface failed to establish the benefits of its service.
  • Lack of persuasion: Cricuru did not pinpoint the problem the product attempted to solve, and initially failed to relate the service they provided to its core values. The product had an amazing tribe of global legends and cricket professionals. But the interface did not do justice to the expertise they brought to the curriculum. Subscription options provided initially were confusing and not differentiated.
  • Complex on-boarding: The first item communicated on the homepage was the requirement to sign up/join Cricuru to get access to the free trial lessons. Access to free content required a very  complicated action on the users’ part to create an account by filling a form, which then required email verification before being able to sign in. The product failed to provide access to the free content before sign up to encourage reciprocity. Users had no idea of the kind of content available on the platform and the value add of the said content.
  • Product not optimised for mobile: Cricuru’s web experience was non-mobile-friendly. It required users to pinch or zoom in order to read the content which created a very frustrating situation and impacted the website’s usability. The analytics pointed major drop off in critical task flows due to this reason.
  • Poor user interface design: Cricuru had an overwhelming look & feel and was neither contemporary nor easy on the eyes. Page layouts were complex and the affordance of UI elements was confusing rendering a dated user experience.

Our Solution

Since the market has no dearth of cricket coaching platforms, we approached this as a persuasion design project which would differentiate Cricuru from the competition. We planned to meet this goal by crafting a self-serving immersive experience by integrating principles like social proof, obedience to authority, surprise, power of free, argue against self-interest, and improving on the information hierarchy and visual design across the product.

The aim was to achieve improvements in key metrics such as:

Bounce rate

Time spent per visit

Traffic on player pages

Increase Registrations and Subscriptions while keeping an eye on personalizing the experience as far as possible keeping the learning needs in mind for different types of players.

Strategic design decisions:

Make the subscription options hyper simple – Persuasion – Mirror the OTT monetization model which users are already familiar with. Create learning content packs which align to the skills & curriculum.

Answer key questions upfront in a coherent & concise manner – What is Cricuru? Who is it for? What will I learn?

Leverage Obedience to Authority – Showcase press coverage to provide more credibility and brag value to the Cricuru initiative.

Don’t give away too much for FREE –   Give users a taste and leave them feeling hungry for more. Provide a short FREE sample video and use that to collect emails/mobile numbers for lead generation.

Make video playlists glance friendly – Ensure each video has a relevant thumbnail and summary description. Sub-categorization of video lessons is better than showing them as a long laundry list.

Ensure that value added features do not complicate the core proposition – Offer video lessons as the core offering and provide an easy-to-use real time AI analysis feature.

The Outcome

Post concept finalisation, we worked towards simplification of key web templates and core flows. The final outcome is a website that is engaging, easy to navigate and reflective of the premium education that Cricuru offers.