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The Project
1. Role: UX Research Lead / Product Experience Lead (MENA)
2. Product: Yango Play (Watch, Music, Interactive Experiences)
3. Scope: Multi-market MENA ecosystem across mobile and connected TV surfaces
Context
Yango Play is a large-scale entertainment super app combining video streaming, music, games, AI assistant and interactive experiences under a single subscription model. The experience spans multiple devices and contexts, mobile, connected TVs, and emerging AI-driven interaction layers, each with different constraints, behaviors, and expectations.
I led UX research and product experience strategy across the platform, partnering closely with product, design, engineering, content, and business stakeholders. My focus was to build decision-ready research inputs, shape a scalable experience foundation, and ensure the product worked across cultures, languages, devices, and real usage contexts.
The challenge
This was not a “design one feature” problem. It was a coherence at scale problem.
Yango Play needed to:
• Serve diverse cohorts across MENA markets with different content behaviors and expectations,
• Support multiple modes with distinct mental models (watching vs listening vs interactive play),
• Balance business goals (subscription growth, retention) with usability, trust, and clarity,
• Scale decisions across teams and surfaces without fragmenting the experience.
The primary risk wasn’t technical capability, it was shipping a product that felt inconsistent, confusing, or culturally misaligned once it met real users.
What we learned that reframed the work
Across markets, users didn’t struggle most with “discovering content.” They struggled with understanding what Yango Play is and how its experiences relate under one subscription.
Users repeatedly questioned:
• What’s included and when,
• How Watch vs Music vs Interactive fit together,
• Why the product feels different across surfaces,
• What the “right” way to use it is for their context (phone vs TV, solo vs shared family use).
This reframed the work from “improving navigation” to clarifying the product’s mental model, what users can do, when, why, and how the parts connect.
Approach
Given the product’s scale, the operating model emphasized continuous, decision-oriented research embedded into delivery cycles, not one-off discovery.
Core principles:
• Research as an ongoing input to product decisions (not a gated phase),
• Early validation of mental models and expectations before committing to build,
• System and interaction design thinking to avoid surface-level fixes,
• Culture, language, and context treated as first-class constraints.
Research and design activities were embedded into product cycles to test assumptions early, course correct fast, and align teams around shared evidence, especially when multiple surfaces and markets created divergent interpretations of “the right UX.”
The initial work supported market expansion post-launch through 6 iterative research rounds and design sprints, contributing to ~1M user growth within two years post-launch.
Methods and Evidence
The program combined qualitative and behavioral methods across key MENA markets, including:
• User interviews and moderated sessions
• Concept and usability testing of early flows and interaction patterns
• Cohort-based expectation analysis and usage behaviors across 8 markets
• Cross-surface journey mapping (mobile / TV) to identify where coherence breaks
The goal was always the same: convert evidence into actionable decisions that scale.
The personas we developed helped uncovering distinct behaviors that directly informed redesigns to onboarding, paywall flows, and content discovery.
Across the program, I conducted and synthesized 400+ hours of behavioral research, producing 70 qual/quant reports (user testing, diary studies, UX audits, and online testing), including studies involving 100,000+ users, while overseeing a $300K/year UX research budget.
Design outcomes
Coherence only matters when it shows up in concrete interaction and UI behaviors. The work translated into product-level decisions that teams could implement repeatedly:
1. Experience boundaries and a shared system language:
We clarified how Watch, Music, and Interactive experiences differ while enforcing a consistent underlying language (navigation rules, content card behavior, labeling logic, state handling, and cross-surface parity principles).
2. Intent-led navigation and entry points:
We oriented entry points around user intent and context (what the user is trying to do right now) rather than treating each content type as a separate “mini app.”
3. Subscription clarity and trust moments:
We prioritized the moments where trust and value perception are formed, first-session understanding, subscription explanation, and paywall-related journeys, so users could confidently answer: “What do I get?” and “What happens next?”
Fidelity was used strategically:
We stayed low-fidelity while validating the mental model, navigation logic, and cross-surface rules, then moved to high-fidelity prototypes for the journeys where visual hierarchy, microcopy, and interaction timing materially affect comprehension and conversion (e.g., onboarding, subscription value explanation, paywall flows, and key navigation surfaces).
These efforts contributed to redesigns that achieved a ~23% reduction in drop-off rates in A/B-tested flows.
Deliverables
Deliverables were designed to de-risk decisions and scale alignment across teams:
• Synthesis frameworks and decision-ready insight packs,
• Cohort segmentation and journey maps informing prioritization,
• Experience principles for cross-surface consistency,
• Wireframes, interaction flows, and pattern rules that designers could reuse,
• Alignment artifacts used in product and leadership discussions.
The outputs were built to be operational, they enabled teams to ship coherent experiences repeatedly as the product evolved and new formats were introduced.
Impact
The research-led experience strategy helped Yango Play:
• Establish a clearer, more coherent product mental model across surfaces and markets,
• Reduce rework by validating assumptions earlier and aligning stakeholders sooner,
• Align multiple teams around shared user evidence,
• Support product decisions across cultures, devices, and usage contexts with higher confidence.
The result was a more scalable experience foundation capable of evolving without fragmenting as new content types, surfaces, and growth initiatives were added.
Reflection
Super apps fail quietly when they become a bundle of disconnected experiences. This work reinforced that at scale, clarity and shared understanding outperform isolated feature optimization, especially across multiple surfaces, cultures, and teams.
The most valuable contribution wasn’t a single feature. It was creating the conditions for better product decisions through evidence, system thinking, and repeatable UX rules that scale.
NDA note:
Some visuals and details are simplified or reconstructed to preserve confidentiality while reflecting real decision-making and outcomes.
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