Keeping NOW TV’s families safe online
Same users, same team, same processes.
Project
With the launch of Broadband, one of NOW TV’s top priorities was to create a security tool for families while browsing the internet at home.
The project kicked-off with a stakeholder meeting. The requirement was to ‘lift and shift’ what Sky was doing for online protection — the Sky Broadband shield.
The Sky Broadband shield is an online tool that allows customers to block and allow web categories as (example:) Social Networking, Online Gaming, etc. By doing so, customers can ensure that their family is protected from browsing inappropriate websites.
Challenge #1: to come up with a name...
It’s really important that you can refer to a project by its name. It makes it real and boosts the team’s shared understanding.
After a few suggestions from different stakeholders and sign-off requests to Brand we finally settled with a name: Broadband Buddy.
Broadband Buddy is reliable and exists to protect your family.
…and an icon
Dhanyaa, our UI designer, dedicated a few days to the project to work on the identity for Broadband Buddy. It wasn’t easy to come up with an icon but she had a few suggestions and we managed to agree on one.
Challenge #2: different frameworks
Though we were asked to ‘lift and shift’ from Sky, we wanted to go through the same process of sketching solutions and thinking about the user journey. And because we don’t share the same framework, we had to make sure it worked for NOW TV.
NOW TV has a specific visual language and patterns the team has been working really hard to build.
A simple example is that Sky uses tabs in their framework and we don’t. We had to think of a clever way to display all the information without overkilling our page.
To replace these tabs we’ve used accordions. We’ve been testing this pattern for quite a while now and it’s been testing successfully so we decided to keep the consistency with other pages in My Account.
Workshops with the development team
It’s great to involve your dev team as early as possible in the project. The idea that only designers have the best solutions is outdated and I can guarantee you’ll get better results if you empower your team to come up with solutions for the problems you’re trying to solve.
My development team is always up for a sketching workshop and they always come up with great ideas. Plus: I have their buy-in from day one which is really handy when it’s time for QA.
Testing with customers
After the sketching sessions and the wireframing, we were ready to test it with customers. Despite having research findings from Sky’s Broadband Shield, NOW TV customers are a different audience and we wanted to make sure we were delivering something that worked for them.
As the budget was low, we decided to go to lab just once and to iterate, if we had to, after the debrief. And because we had one chance to test with real customers, we refined the wireframes to test a more visual prototype.
Watershed? Ah! So this is about TV.
We tested Broadband Buddy in lab without making any changes to the age rating labels and titles that Sky is using. Age ratings are universal so we took this for granted.
During the testing session we observed customers struggling mainly with two things:
We were using ‘PG (Parental Guidance) — Suitable for everyone’ to describe the most safe age rating. While going through the page customers struggled to understand this rating. The setting was confusing as it said it’s suitable for everyone but starts with ‘Parental Guidance’. This didn’t make sense to customers so we had to go back and make it work.
We also used the term ‘Watershed’ to refer to the hours the restrictions would switch to ‘Suitable for 18’ and parents can navigate adult categories.
Though people on their 40+ understood the term, the majority thought that we were referring to TV creating a lot of confusion. This is a common term for British people but it’s specific to TV and we had to go back and review.
Changing names
Changing names was a challenge. Specially because we were dealing with the Legal and Brand departments. Thankfully, we have Mark.
Mark is our copywriter and he’s the one coming up with amazing copy for our projects. He’s also the one having the difficult conversations :)
Mark takes part in our projects from day one — and yes, he’s also sketching with us. Copy is a huge part of the User Experience and is fundamental that we are completely aligned.
We’ve changed ‘PG — Suitable for everyone’ to ‘Suitable for kids with parental guidance’ and ‘Watershed’ to ‘Grown up browsing time’. We also made sure we were using the words internet and browsing often in the copy.
Showcases to stakeholders and other teams
We like keeping our stakeholders and the other teams updated and showcases serve as a way to get feedback.
Once we iterated the designs we showcased to the wider team. As everyone was happy with the tool, the development team continued their work with the goal to deliver in the following weeks.
So, what’s NOW TV Broadband Buddy?
Broadband Buddy is NOW TV’s online security tool to help parents protect their family from browsing inappropriate websites. Parents can visit this tool at any time to update their settings or turn Off completely.
In the settings page, customers will be able to:
a. Select the age rating that is more adequate to their family (each age rating has a specific number of blocked and allowed categories).
b. Define hours to the 18 age rating to apply. Customers will be able to browse 18 age rating categories during this period — great feature for families with an established routine :)
c. Block and/or Allow specific websites meaning they can select an age rating with a certain blocked category (example: Social Networking) but allow www.facebook.com in this section.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
If you’re a NOW TV Broadband customer I’d love to hear your feedback. Visit Parental controls — Broadband Buddy here.
