Rethinking Content Discovery
Discovery workshop
We ran a workshop with all the members of the Discover cluster*, a multi-disciplinary team responsible for content discovery across YouView.
The focus of the workshop was to come up with ideas for new content Discovery experiences, and the day was structured like this:
Introduction
Review of customer feedback on content discovery
Overview of usage data
Competitor review
Future forecasting
Group design activities
*Cluster is a YouView term for an agile multi-disciplinary team, sometimes referred to in other organisations as ‘tribes’ or ‘squads’. They consist of a Product Owner, Project manager, Designers, Developers, Test Engineers and Data analysts.
When designing Next Generation YouView, we often referred to three common user mindsets:
I know what I want to watch
I don't know exactly what I want, but I'll know it when I see it
I have no idea what I want to watch.
As we designed Discovery experiences, we focused on supporting the two groups of users who don’t know what they want.
Competitor review
I ran an activity with the group where we reviewed the discovery experiences of eight competitor products. People looked at each product and then wrote down what they liked and disliked about each one.
We then looked for patterns in the positive and negative feedback. This was used to help guide our design ideas later in the day.
Idea generation
We split into teams and spent some time developing different ideas. We used the information that was presented earlier in the day to help answer a brief:
Ways that you might hear about a show/film you might want to watch
This was the seed with which each group could generate several different ideas. At the end of the session, each group prioritised and presented their ideas. We then did a ‘dot voting’ exercise to see which ideas were the most popular among the wider team.
After the workshop…
Wireframes
After the workshop, I was tasked with taking some of the ideas and presenting them to our shareholders as a possible future vision for content discovery on YouView. To start the process, I created some wireframes to help me communicate the ideas.
Concept designs
Following a presentation to our shareholders, I began to develop the strongest ideas further, with a view to getting customer feedback during some upcoming user research.
User research
We had some users coming into the office to take part in research for another part of YouView, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to get some feedback on the concepts.
I started by creating a questionnaire for the users to complete at home. We wanted to find out how they were discovering content and what affected their discovery journey.
During the session, we discussed content discovery, showed users the concepts to get their feedback, and conducted a card sorting exercise to find out how they prioritised different types of content.
Prototype
Following user research, I created a prototype to bring the concepts to life. This prototype aims to share the vision within YouView and enable us to conduct more user research in the future.
The prototype uses actual data from YouView’s cloud endpoints and can also display live TV using HLS streams.
The prototype currently consists of a fully interactive Main Menu. The TV Shows, Sports, Film and Kids full-screen sections are currently placeholder images, but they will also be fully interactive later.
Next steps
The next steps are to conduct ethnographic research in customers’ homes to learn more about how they are discovering content. This research output will then be used to iterate on the concepts and prototype.