OVERVIEW
Co-Star is a personalized astrological social app that brings the ancient practice of astrology into the 21st century.
“Most horoscopes ask what month you were born. Co–Star asks what minute. Powered by AI that merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers.”
Website: Co-Star
Platform: Native IOS app
Team: Solo
“Unlike the broad and vague horoscopes you usually read in magazines, we take more than just your sun sign into account. We use a complete picture of the sky when and where you were born to generate hyper-personalized horoscopes.”
The Challenge
Why Co-Star app?
My wife introduced me to Co-Star app:
“You should try! It’s free and if you create your profile and friend request me, we can share our horoscope information and read about our zodiac connection. If I could change some things about it, I think it would be beneficial to see the daily horoscope updates on the homepage. The Co-Star homepage is very cool but I want to see my daily horoscope before looking into the charts and more confusing stuff.” Abby
I asked her if she has any friends who use the same app so that I could interview them. It came as no surprise that she had many friends that use the app and once interviewed, they all said the same thing.
I learned that:
The information that the users want to see the most are the daily horoscopes (updates)
Many get confused by the “done” button in the “Settings” page
The Solution
Style:
For the style I decided to keep the same vibe of the app: a moon with grey and white tones. I had trouble finding and re-using their font so I decided to use a very modern font: ROBOTO.
Homepage:
The challenge for me after analyzing this app a lot, was to keep the daily horoscope page as visible and easy to locate as possible. Instead of opening the app and immediately being taken to the original Co-Star homepage, my update has taken the users requests into consideration by showing the daily horoscope on the homepage instead. That makes it easy to see since it is the most important and requested user feature. Then I added the Co-Star tab on the bottom navigation so it can still be easily accessed with a click of a button (See last image below).
• Daily horoscope moved directly to the homepage, reducing the steps the user has to do to find it
•Bottom Navigation created to find “Co-star” tab easily (old homepage), making it easier to jump from the Co-Star information to the daily horoscope and charts
•Changes made for an easier visual navigation process
Settings page:
Most of the users get confused when they see a black button that says “done” instead of an arrow when trying to go back. The “done” makes the users think they are exiting the app, instead of just going back to the previous page.
• I decided to transform this confusing “Done” button to a simple “Back” arrow. This makes it easier to understand.
• Redesigned with a minimalist style
Conclusion
Based on the user experience from the lens of my wife and her friends, these changes were very appreciated. My wife was so happy with the final concept and wishes that the app would implement my design. It was a fun experience for her to see it. These solo projects help me train my skills because each project is completely different and requires different needs. I loved the excitement and creative process of redesigning this cool app!