The MotorTrend SVOD service first launched with the ability to only favorite shows. Through additional competitive research and listening to our users, having the ability to save episodes for later was shaping up to be a valuable feature to our users.
Project Services
- User Research
- Competitive Analysis
- UX & Customer Journeys
- UI
- QA Testing
The Problem
The inability to easily access episodes of interest at a later time was the issue we were hearing from our users. They were unable to build a custom experience to easily access their favorite content.
User Feedback:
“Allow me to create a queue of episodes when streaming”
“I would like to favorite an episode because of the tech it talked about. Then I can refer back to it.”
“It needs a way to create a newsfeed of episodes for the shows that I like.”
The Solution
The proposed solution came from both team collaboration and research. When researching the competitive landscape, I saw many variations of a “save” icon. To strengthen my decision on an icon, I ran an in-house poll to about 50 people. This helped prove that the “plus” icon made it clear how to save content.
Team collaboration played a key roll in our process as well. On the iOS side, the engineering team and I discussed a more native approach vs. a custom experience for the context menus. This would result in quicker execution, thus allowing us to get the feature in front of users faster to monitor engagement.
Context menus are accessible by tapping a new ellipsis icon or long pressing the episode card that offers options to visit the show page, bookmark the video, or begin watching the video. These menus also became accessible on show cards. This adds an entire new navigation path to the mobile app and opens the door to future menu options such as social sharing of content or downloading for offline viewing.
Customer Journey
“Billy, a traditional hobbyist, is watching an episode of Hot Rod Garage explaining an interesting car painting technique. Billy has a restoration project of his own in the works and plans to paint his car the same way when ready. He bookmarks this episode so he can easily revisit it and apply these learnings to his restoration.”
In order to understand your users, you have to step into their shoes and understand their needs and challenges. Empathize with your users to understand their pain points, and predict their behaviors. Building a customer journey also provides a uniform view of the experience internally, ensuring various teams (marketing, sales, product, tech…) all have the same intelligence, allowing everyone to work towards common company goals.
Accessing Saved Content
How do users access their saved content? With the success of the “Continue Watching” carousel on the home screen, we wanted to test a “Watchlist” carousel. The thought here was to give the home screen a more personalized feel.
Qualitative Feedback and Performance
The mobile team rolled out an Apptentive survey to gauging users’ awareness and usage of newly released features. Bookmarking and binging episodes via the Watchlist have shown promising usage based on responses.
20% of all videos are started from a Show or Episode bookmark, while 80% of all videos are started from elsewhere in the experience.
In Conclusion
Now that users were able to bookmark content to watch later, we provided a convenient and frictionless way to access episodes of interest. It was a perfect coupling of content discovery by day and lean back viewing by night.