Taringa! - Mobile App Case Study

The_Client

Taringa! is a virtual community in which users share all kinds of information through a collaborative system of interaction. There are 35 million unique users per month in the mobile platform alone. These users create thousands of daily posts with general interest topics, such as tutorials, life hacks, recipes, news, sports, and reviews. In addition, since 2011, the platform includes a section of microcontents called “Mi Taringa!” that has grown 350% just this year.

+75M

daily unique visitors

shouts per month

10.5M

posts per month

The_Challenge

Logically, the use of microcontent made more sense on a mobile platform than in any other medium, so “Mi Taringa!” was chosen as the beginning of a strategy of mobile standalone products. Thus, they expected to penetrate the market of humor, memes, and GIFs in Spanish, a concept that was very popular worldwide but was yet to be explored in Latin America. We had to design and develop the app in only 10 weeks, helping Taringa! to position itself as the main source of entertainment in the little breaks people have when using public transportation or waiting at the doctor's office.

Taringa needed to

Launch

The Mobile Version Of “Mi Taringa!”

Our strategy

Redesign

The Visual Interface Using Material Design

Position

Itself As Market Leader

Improve

The Content Consumption Experience

The_Approach

Branding

The objective was to generate an identity all of its own, to differentiate it from other sections of the platform, and to identify it as a product of Taringa! For this purpose, we used a methodology called Kapferer's Prism or Brand Identity Prism. We built experience into the app as a relationship between two people: thinking of the brand on the same level as the users, to give it a sense of interactivity and make it even more relatable.

Iconography & Illustration

The illustrations worked with the loud and fun character of the shouts. Consequently, we created a conceptual Taringa! world, shaped as an island in which different community elements coexist, rendered with the informal and entertaining style of the brand.

Iconography

In order to give personality to the app, we created an icon system that reflected the fun, sociable, and minimalistic side of Taringa!, with round and simple shapes.

App Design

The two central points for our work in designing the app were simplifying the experience and complementing the content without overshadowing it. We constantly wondered what was important for the users, and always arrived at two principal actions: consuming and generating content.

Wireframes

We explored possible design structures following Material Design guidelines.

Then we defined the app flow adjusting the structures to the content.

We performed a specialized work in the notifications, taking into account all the variables and factors necessary to achieve the best functioning without bothering users.

Visuals

We adjusted the identity to the guidelines of Material Design, including customized elements such as icons, logos, illustrations, color palette, and copywrite.

In this stage we applied the variables we analyzed for notifications and we identified certain parameters to consider before making the design.

Motion UI

The plan was to take advantage of the suggestions of Material Design and the fun aspect of the brand to give personality to the app.

App Development

The challenge was implementing Material Design for a product already in production. We recycled data structures that were being used at that moment and replaced non-native components that caused problems in performance and usability. To obtain the data from Taringa, we used the data of its API. By using GIFs as the main format, it was necessary to wait for the download to finish to be able to run them. The solution for this problem was using WebM to reduce the waiting time between the beginning of the download and the running of the video.

Taringa! Shouts

Full redesign of the app using Material Design.