Fullscreen
Increase in content navigation and interactivity.
Summary
Fullscreen SVOD was targeted for the nostalgic millennial. The core video library consisted of a rotation of licensed content from the past (think Saved by the Bell), mixed with exclusive content made by Fullscreen-represented social media stars (examples: Shane Dawson’s “Shane and Friends” and Shan Boody’s “Shan Boody is your Perfect Date”).
Our cross platform experience was a mobile-first strategy, eventually leading to a web experience as well as OTT (ATV and Roku).
Team: 3 UX designers, 3 UI designers. Direct report to Head of Design: Trent Good.
Task at Hand
Assess the current UX state native mobile, web and ATV
Look into existing data
Understand the business goals, including that of AT&T partnership
Create an ostensible system for product managers and editorial staff to self-manage
Evangelize for the user depending on the platform (Mobile on-the-go? Or, hanging out at home and needing a lean-back experience)
Help come up with intuitive ideas for bringing up new content or relevant deals to a user
UX Challenges
Short list of challenges.
It was time consuming to find something because we could not afford to build a recommendation engine, leading to subjectively labeled carousels of content.
Not always mobile friendly (even the native mobile work).
Explaining to a user how long a piece of content would be on platform to set user expectation of a piece of content properly (sunrise, sunset information).
Make it simple (which took many rounds of discussion across the company, sketching, and wireframing).
Come up with new engagement ideas to keep paying customers engaged.
Data
All Platforms: In the carousels, the ones that did best were those where personalization was used.
Depending on where placed, Continue Watching saw the most engagement (seen here as Carousel 1)
Carousel 2 was mostly ignored (Promoted by the business, larger images, not based on a recommendation engine)
Depending on where placed, My Watchlist had the next highest engagement
Carousel 3-on were editorialized (videos themed together) and saw a sharp drop off the longer the user had to scroll to get to a carousel.
Continue Watching, versus editorialized, carousels
Business Goals
Stakeholders and product were able to ask to question, what are the goals here?
Overall, make it more fun to use
Primary Goal: Increase average watch time per user
Secondary Goal: Increase active users (DAU, MAU)
Results
By elevating the level of usability on all platforms, we were able to see product managers deploying without overlapping features, have the ability to test on the same page. Users also had much more control over content.
Testing Automatic video play with sound
OTT: There was a lot of A/B testing from the product management team to see if starting a video automatically would help or hinder a user’s flow of finding something to watch (or, not having to think.) We found that:
Turning sound off until a user explicitly selected an item helped with user engagement (users were not prepared for sound to blare if they did not explicitly select a piece of content to “Play”).
Starting video without a user’s explicit permission meant it took longer for a user to focus on selecting content they would want to watch because they were distracted by the animation.
Users did best when content select layout for their remote slid up and down the “Featured” carousel (up or down only) instead of in a matrix (up, down, across options)
Browse view: users were most used to any paradigms set by Apple TV, and slight divergence from that layout caused longer thinking time on the user to select an item to watch.
2. Carousels
All Platforms: In the carousels, the ones that did best were those where personalization was used.
3. Search
Mobile search saw a lift in wayfinder through people they knew in an episode, which led to more video watching.
Final Thoughts
Though the service was closed, we were able to use all our learnings to improve the Rooster Teeth SVOD experience (yay!), which Fullscreen acquired at the same time as closing the FS SVOD experience.
The CEO took a long-term view of investing in the product, and when we were acquired by Otter Media, any products that were in the red were immediately closed and staff either let go or reassigned.
More on AT&T/Ottermedia restructuring here (Dec 4th, 2018).
Documentation
This project has been broken down into components.
