A cross service streaming platform that provides a seamless viewing journey
Overview
Duration
My Role
2 weeks
Team
I worked in a team of 3 UX designers on a 2 week sprint, collaborating on user research including user interviews and synthesising research results, and leading design and prototyping.
3 UX designers
Project Skills
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User interviews
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Workshop
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Contextual Inquiries
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Competitive research
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Personas
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User journey mapping
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Feature Prioritisation
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Ideation (Sketching)
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Prototyping (Figma)
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Usability testing
Bringing a digital solution to Utelly that tailored to consumer needs
Utelly is a UK focus TV guide combining live television with catchup and on demand services.
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“TV = live broadcast + catch-up + on-demand”
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Our goal was to redesign and bring a digital solution to Utelly with a main focus on tailoring to online video consumer needs.
Our journey started with knowing who is our target audience.
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The Goal
Bring a digital solution to Utelly that tailored to consumer needs
WHO
Online video content consumers
Understanding online video content consumers
8 Interviews , 5 contextual inquiries and a 5 person workshop to identify consumers frustrations and needs
We wanted to understand how and why users consume online video content, and where are the gaps and deficiencies in the current offerings and conducted user interviews and a workshop.
We used scenarios to create a dialogue with our users and conducted contextual inquiries to capture how consumers find content to watch online to validate and add to what users say.
"You want to watch Harry Potter, can you show me how you would do that? "
Scenario 1
"You want to find something new to watch online. How would you do that?"
Scenario 2
"You have some time to kill today and you want to pass the time with some online video content, what would you do?"
Scenario 3
After the Research, We synthesised our research results by organising all the data gathered to find patterns and themes.
Key findings
Overwhelming
Consumers feel overwhelmed with the amount of content in the market and find it difficult to find content to watch
“There are too many platforms, not a fan of number of competition”
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“i feel overwhelmed with the amount of content in the market”
Availability of the content
Consumers would just give up on watching something if it’s not immediately available
“I’m not gonna watch it if it’s not on the platforms that i subscribed to”
Barriers to subscribe to a new platform
Money, effort, perceived value threshold, lack of knowledge are the barriers
“I don’t think I would ever use another application”
“I use my partners/parents/siblings/housemates account”
Various ways to discover content
Consumers prefer to discover content through recommendations, search, word of mouth and reviews.
“Googled top movies of 2019 for new content to watch"
“I use IMDB to collect information”
“I ask my friends to find new content to watch”
"Power user" and "Casual user"
Our primary user is the "connected streamer" who spends a lot of time online watching video, not only for entertainment but also for staying connected at all times. Our secondary persona is the "casual user" who is busy with life and looking for a more effective way to find new content to watch. We created two personas to represent different online video consumer types based on our research results. We separated our users type based on device usage, preferred channels and the goals of consuming video content online along with the frustrations.
We used a journey map to visualised the process of our primary persona "the connected streamer"trying to watch something new online. Our secondary person Anthony's pain points mainly occurs during the content discovery stage, his main goal is to have a more effective way to find new content. With our primary persona Charles, his focus is on the whole journey from content discovery to entice. We used journey map to identify users pain points through out the whole journey for Utelly to address .
Finding new content is overwhelming
Charles Power
Expectations
Scenario: Charles wants to watch something new online
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Immediate access to the new content
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High quality of the content
Thinking
"That looks amazing"
"Is this the show John was taking about?"
"Alright,let me find it"
"Ok, Now let's watch this"
"This is so good!"
"Do i have time for another?"
"What else is out there?
Thinking
"Hmm, where is it?"
"Wait, it's not on Netflix?"
"Ok, so what else would it be on?"
"Don't know what to watch"
"What a waste of time..."
Pain points
Too many ads
Hard to find content
Hard to navigate across platforms
Uncertainty about the quality of content
Needs a way to share thoughts
Opportunities
Fewer
(Irrelevant)
Ads
Simpler content discovery
Reduce the frictions between platforms
More powerful Recs to lower the risk of bad shows
Social/Review features in platform
Framing the right problem
that we are facing
Problem statement
Charles Power, "the connected streamer", tried to find new content to watch online but he felt overwhelmed with the amount of content and platforms in the market. He found it hard to find new content to watch.
Solution statement
Charles Power,"the connected streamer", needs a effective way to discover new content and a seamless streaming experience across different platforms.
We used HMW (How Might We) statements based on insights from the research to help brainstorm ideas and turn the insights into design in order to address the pain points
HMW
Make it easier and more effective for users to discover content
HMW
Enable users to stay connected all the time
HMW
Reduce the frictions between different platforms
HMW
Help consumers to get immediate access content
Competitors analysis
We conducted direct and indirect competitor analysis to help us understanding the current market, and services with a main focus on the UI, social aspect, recommendation system and Seamless.
Direct
Aggregation platform comparison
There's a gap in the current market as there is no platform among the competitors that is currently offering satisfying social feature, highly tailored recommendations while having an intuitive UI and enable user to a seamless experience all at once.
Indirect
Major streaming platform comparison
During our user interviews, users express "unwavering love" for Netflix with a clear reason behind it-it is the easiest to use. An intuitive UI can enable user to have a seamless experience. There's a lack of social aspect in the current market
Design Goals
Highly tailored
recommendation
Personalised recommendation that enable users to discover content in the most effective way
Social feed
A "social feed" feature within the app, enable users to stay connected at all times
A seamless experience across
platforms
An seamless way to access different platforms
Intuitive UI
A simple UI, makes it easy for users to navigate
Effective content discovery functions
Searches for content setup based on data pulled. Enable users to sort lists intelligently
Prioritising features
We used a impact-effort matrix to prioritise ideas and features. The best case scenario results in providing a high impact feature with the low effort level. We includes features with a high impact feature with the low effort level in the MVP. We further categorised other features into "should have", "could have" and "won't have" based on the impact and level of effort.
MVP
COULD
WON'T
SHOULD
Should have
Bringing the solution to Utelly
Original sketches
High-fidelity prototype
Mid-fidelity prototypes
Generating design ideas that tailored to users need
In the early design stage, we sketched out a few ideas of the MVP features and how they were going to fit into our design.
Onboarding
Homepage
Content Page
Social Feed
Usability testing of first prototype with online video content consumers
We came up with a mid-fi prototype to test. We tested the first iteration with 5 online video content consumers. The concept was received well and met participants' expectations. On a higher level, our participants gave us feedback on the flow of onboarding and certain features where we could provide further details and improve on. We made the changes according to the patterns that we discovered from participants feedback.
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We added information features in the second iteration to give more information to users as users were confused with the onboarding process and didn't know why certain questions were asked.
Users were looking for more functions in the bottom navigation bar. We added "Home" and "Friends" to the navigation bar to make it easier for users to navigate to homepage and social feed
Final updates
During our last iteration, we developed our prototype into a high-fidelity interface focusing on UI, interaction, user flow, and user behavior. We tested the Hi-fi prototype with 5 online video content consumers
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The interactive elements and user flow were received well and met consumer's expectations. Our target users gave us feedback on some of the UI elements. We checked the color contrast between the foreground and background of the elements in our design to meet accessibility requirements.
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AA
AA
We changed the colour contrast between the foreground and background of the some elements in our design to make sure they meet the AA (minimum contrast for fonts below 18pt)
Users found the initial homepage a bit messy. We changed the colour scheme and created more negative space. We also enlarged the bottom navigation to make it ease to use.
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​Final design
Highly tailored recommendation
Effective content discover functions
Social feed
A seamless experience across
platforms
Try the prototype
Next steps
Conduct more rounds of usability testing to evaluate our design
Usability testing
Add feature
Add "subscribe to new platforms" feature to the product through design and evaluate by usability testing
Measure of success
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Activation (Sign-up rate, subscription rate)
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Satisfaction (Use customer satisfaction survey to track satisfaction and ease of use)
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Retention (Monthly active users)
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Referral (Add referral program and track the number of sign up through referral)