By skyforbes 
Project Details
Dharmayana is a Faith-Tech Platform with the intention of guiding users through the rich traditions and culture of Hinduism. This case study encompasses the journey of designing this app from ground zero for 150k+ users, catering to their requirements and pain points.
My Role — Product Designer, Responsible for research, conceptualisation, design, user testing and delivery of key modules and feature areas.
Timeline — Jan’24 — Sep’24
Who is this app for?
We identified 2 categories of people for whom we could solve for —
- The Religious People — People who are constantly in touch with their culture like praying every morning, following auspicious timings etc. These people were generally aged 40+ and have been following rituals like these since a long time.
- The New Generation — People who aren’t very knowledgable in the whole area of religious practices and rituals. These are usually the younger generation aged 20+ and have seen their parents follow these rituals diligently but haven’t picked it up.
Each of them had their own problems and we tried to solve for both while trying to focus more on the first category — The Religious People, because they amounted to a much larger number and much more invested than the second category.
Problem Statement
For Religious People
A lot of Hindu materials like the Hindu Calendar (Panchang), timings for auspicious days (Muhurta), important festivals etc. have always been in physical form, which led to inaccessibility for users.
For The New Generation
The newer generation for several reasons has not been interested enough into their culture and rituals. This lack of interest is mainly due to the difficulty in interpreting the materials, because of language and lack of knowledge in the domain.
Getting the MVP up and running
The Project started with talks with the founders and where they potentially found an opportunity. The first few talks mostly revolved around understanding the problem statement, and since it was an app based on core Hindu culture, it took a great effort from our side to understand the terms and processes.
For the MVP we had to consider a common problem for both the categories of users to get good initial traction and then build from there.
Research and Breaking down the problem
A common point to start from — Panchang
The Panchang is the most basic scripture in the Hindu Culture and was a good starting point to tackle problems for both the user groups.
Talking to some potential users of the app about how they go about the whole process of looking at a Panchang was super insightful and helped us take key decisions for our experiences. Here are a few takeaways —
🌐 Language was a barrier, all physical materials were in native languages and difficult to read and understand.
📵 Inaccessible due to it’s physical form.
📆 Had to buy a copy every year and keep the previous ones safe to access later.
How did we solve for it?
Panchang is usually a complicated document and is very difficult to read if you have no experience. How do we make that easy?
To achieve this, we’ll take the following approach:
- Limit information to absolute important stuff: We’ll only add information that is absolutely important and widely used, based on user behaviour instead of piling the screen with anything and everything.
- Seamless navigation to any date, month, or year: Easily look for dates in the past or in the future to plan your days accordingly.
- Personalisation to your region: We’ll show you what is important to you and you only, tailored to your region and culture.
- Daily Panchanga Updates: Get notified everyday with panchang for the day.
This marked the MVP for the app and it’s very first release on AppStore and Playstore.
Festivals and Shubh Karyas
Once the first release was done we could now get started on the next problem the users faced, festivals, their occurrences, auspicious timings and days. Festivals hold a central place in the lives of practitioners, being key to cultural and religious practices.
Certain days, such as Amavasya, Pitru Paksha, eclipses (grahana), etc., are traditionally considered inauspicious. On these days, certain activities, especially ‘Shubh Karyas’ (auspicious works), are avoided.
Takeaways from user interviews —
⏰ Difficult to keep track of muhurta timings on a daily basis.
📄 Refer to Panchang to find festivals thereby, inaccessible
📰 Published in Newspapers, cumbersome to find.
📆 Only day-wise available, cannot plan for future days.
How did we solve for it?
The initial step involves compiling a comprehensive list of festivals and significant days, which amounts to around 500 entries. However, it’s important to recognise that not all these days carry equal relevance for our user base.
To achieve this, we’ll take the following approach:
- Regional Identification: We’ll segment the list by identifying different regions across India.
- Regional Top Festivals: For each region, we’ll collate the 10–15 most celebrated festivals.
- Curation and Consolidation: We will get approximately 40–50 significant days and these will be the ones most relevant and widely observed. We call these Tier 1 festivals. The rest are called Tier 2 festivals.
- User Expectation and Trust: Users seeking guidance from a Panchang expect it to cover all aspects of the traditional calendar comprehensively, including inauspicious days.
- Informed Decision Making: Knowledge about inauspicious days helps users align their activities with cultural norms, aiding them in making decisions that adhere to their spiritual and cultural beliefs.
Social Share — Panchang and Festival
Once the core features were all set, our iteration involved finding things to improve in the existing app. The Share feature was born out of this iteration and is a perfect example of how observation can drive innovation.
Observation
The target users of the app were usually aged 40+, and one of their behaviour’s caught our eye. Sharing images on WhatsApp every morning!
Now a Panchang is something that is usually looked at the start of the day, we tried to co-relate both these things to make up a new feature for the app.
How did we solve for it?
At this point we had two core features setup, Panchang and Festivals. Both of them had the potential of having a share feature.
Panchang is usually a very long and descriptive material and the challenge here was to concisely pack into one image which can be shared.
The share feature also had the potential to increase the adoption rate for the app. So providing a link to the app with every share was beneficial.
Get your Kundli in Minutes
The Kundli feature was born out of pure confusion!
Our users were searching for “kundli”, “kundli matching”, etc terms in the search bar which was actually meant for searching festivals and auspicious days on the app. We actually had a Typewriter Motion Interaction present with relevant things to search but still the users searched for Kundli and related terms. There was a demand, and we had to supply.
Still not very sure if the feature will gain enough traction, we tried to test it out. Designed a Simple Card which took you to WhatsApp (Support Chat), where the user could share relevant details and a pandit would generate their kundli in 30 mins.
The feature gained decent amount of traction and we then launched a full-fledged feature out of it, with 3 options to choose from. This was our first monetised feature in the app!
Prarthana
The goal behind building Prarthana (Prayer) was to make prayer sessions as effortless and engaging as using Spotify. Alternatively, we can compare it to having an “elder-in-the-family” who is helping the seeker.
The prathana feature unlike rest of the features was targeted more on the 2nd category of the user — The New Generation.
📃 Lack of resources to perform prathana daily.
👵 Frequent guidance of an elder person from home needed.
🛐 Difficult to inculcate it as an habit.
How do we solve for it?
To achieve this, we’ll take the following approach:
- Introducing Daily Prarthanas — Offer Prarthana based on the day of the week and the deity revered on that day.
- Audio and Text Prathana — Choose how you wish to perform Prarthana — through listening or reading.
- Available in Multiple Languages — Access your Prarthana in your native language and eliminate language barriers.
- Countless deities to offer Prarthana to — Beyond daily Prarthana, seek divine blessings on special occasions, festivals, and before important endeavors.
Scalable App — Home Page
Considering that there are a lot of user needs to be solved yet, we needed to widen our horizon and think about how the app will scale in the future. The first step in that direction was to make an efficient and scalable Home Page.
How did we solve for it?
The approach was to keep the basics intact and make space for future features to embed seamlessly.
To achieve this, we’ll take the following approach:
- A banner to showcase our top features — We’ll add a banner depicting a festival and daily prarthana on any given day.
- List of Features — A dynamic and scalable list of our features & offerings, continuously evolving to meet our user’s needs.
- Daily Panchang, Muhurta and Festivals at a Glance — Encapsulating all Panchang & Muhurta information in a concise manner.
- Recent Prarthana — Showing which Prarthana the user has completed recently on the app.
- Sponsor Ads and Learn More — The home page also has a space for sponsor ads and collaborations and a Learn more section which consists of reading material for the user.
That was the end of this case study, Dharmayana has a long journey to cover and reach a million users but this was it for now.
Hope you liked it.
Thank you.
Connect with me on email — [email protected]
Learn more Dharmayana — Journey from 0 to 150k+ downloads