UX Case Study: miPlayer, making BBC iPlayer the number one online streaming service
The Brief
- To make iPlayer the number one TV streaming service in the UK by capturing the current and potential audience in a unique and compelling way.
My role
I was in charge of:
- Research including synthesisation
- Ideation
- Translation of lo-fi prototypes into mid-fi prototypes using Sketch
- Validation through user testing
- Accessibility checks
Discover and Define: Understanding client and users
The client:
‘Our aim is to enrich people’s lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain by being the most creative organisation in the world.’
Following this, we decided to understand the current market including BBC’s offer.
We looked closely at the BBC and iPlayer, and also at the major competitors: Netflix, Amazon, Now TV and ITV Player. Later we also identified YouTube as a major competitor.
We also saw Spotify as an indirect competitor, and I will develop this further in the presentation.
We looked at each streaming service’s proposition and at features including:
- Multiple accounts
- Rating shows
- Add to watch list
- Social media sharing tools
One of our key findings on this initial process was that iPlayer already had a micro-website called Taster, that allowed users to try, share and rate new ideas. This would steer us away from developing a micro-website, which was one of the potential outcomes highlighted on the brief. YouTube also incorporates this approach.
As mentioned, we saw Spotify as an indirect competitor, but one from which we could take a lot of insights. It also offers an audio streaming service, and it explores the user’s multiple screens and social media interaction in various ways.
We also found a very interesting feature from ITV: a companion app for the TV show ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, that allowed the user, while watching the show on a laptop, Smart TV or tablet, to find further information, interact and vote on the acts via mobile phone.
This process gave us an understanding of the current streaming landscape. But before exploring solutions, we needed to focus on understanding our users’ needs.
To find out what our target audience thought of TV streaming, we ran a screener survey which had 52 respondents. Once we had the quantitative results we started to see some patterns emerge. We then selected a group of 16 people with which to run individual user interviews, in order to gain a deeper understanding of our potential users’ needs and behaviours.
But what did we learn? We found out that 75% of our users stream online content more than five times per week; we also learnt that 44 % watch online content alone, and that 62% either share on social media or, even if they don’t interact, they look at what other people are saying.
During the process of synthesising the information, and with the objective of building further empathy with our target audience, we came across some interesting insights that we considered key and that tied very well with the client’s brief.
These insights showed us that:
- Our target audience looks at what other people are saying/doing/watching
- They want to be connected
- They want to be able to relax
- They wish to curate their own content as much as possible
Hypothesis
So we found ourselves in the middle of a paradox. The paradox being that, regardless of the media chosen, there was an inherent need, at least in the majority of the 16 people we interviewed, to isolate themselves from the stresses of daily life. There was also the need to stay connected through a less invasive media that they could easily control, be it social media or background noise via on-demand content.
Personas: Who is our model user?
Having gathered all of this information, we created Lucy. She was the personification of the research phase findings.
Problem statement:
When Lucy gets home after work, she likes to unwind and, after cooking dinner, likes to stream her favourite TV shows. She usually has her phone with her, because after spending all day talking to strangers, she wants to engage with her nearest and dearest.
Design and Deliver: Ideation
We ran a Design Studio, in which we each had to create eight different solutions (The Crazy 8). We decided to go for my solution: a companion app that could edit videos on the go to make them into shareable GIFs.
Once we were clear on the proposed solution we created a user flow
At this point, we had a good understanding of the market and our users, and we plotted Lucy’s journey in which the main goal was to share a clip on social media.
But she could achieve that in different ways.
We developed a feature prioritization graph, relating our goals with the feasibility costs, and we agreed that a GIF would be the best option.
From here we laid out all of the objectives and features that we wanted to develop, in order to understand what to prioritise before starting to develop our minimum viable product.
This prioritization also provided a clearer understanding of the app’s navigation and structure, which enabled us to develop our first paper prototype.
We ran six user testing sessions and the key findings from those were:
- The amount of information we needed to include in the slug
- A lack of understanding on what was on the main image
- That the edit wasn’t being perceived as a back button
Once we got to mid-fi prototyping, and after testing it with six users, we decided to create another mid-fi clickable prototype based on the insights that we’d gained. So we moved the slug from the bottom to the top area of the screen, and decided that the ‘NEXT’ screen was repetitive and therefore unnecessary.
Accessibility Check
To make sure we’d be complying with BBC guidelines, we ran an accessibility test on the BBC iPlayer native app for people with a visual impairment. We found that, depending on the level and type of the user’s disability, the pink text over the black couldn’t be read and that the text overlaying images was impossible to even guess at, among other findings.
And here is the final result
Testing and Feedback
