Defining how to grow, sustain, engage and increase value to customers.
Getting comfortable
To build a better understanding of our client's current, and potential future customers, Hello Human conducted in-house contextual inquiries to see their online video watching habits.
This involved visiting a cross-section of "viewing types" (single, couple, family) to understand how the context in which they view videos changes what they choose to watch and therefore what can be done to help influence more accurate viewing decisions.
By being in their homes we were able to build a better understanding of:
Any potential issues they have with their services
Different types of equipment setup
The amount of time taken to browse and search to find something to watch
Who do they normally watch with
Daily habits and general usage or feedback
The insights generated from the ethnographic research generated a number of high-level themes that could be used to drive future product decisions. To help drive engagement within the product teams we created and distributed a number of design toolkits that could be used for any day-to-day product decisions.
Baseline test of the current experience
Whenever you are looking to tweak, redesign, or re-market an existing product it's definitely worth creating a baseline to compare any future changes against. With our client, we were able to test their current on-demand app with past, current and potential future customers.
Within these sessions, the research and design team uncovered:
How do they feel about video on demand and their offerings in general
What they expect from on-demand if they hadn’t used it already
What they felt was missing from the experience
How do they expect to browse for the content they want to watch
Whether advertising affects their viewing decisions
Onboarding and accounts
Anything else that we can use to improve the overall experience
Define a high-level concept vision
Now that customer research, insight themes and a usability testing baseline had been completed. The Hello Human design team prepared a concept of the “future of video-on-demand” to showcase new features, functionality or flows that can help customers find what they really want to watch. The concept design was focused on a number of areas:
Onboarding and registration
Recommendations
Reducing time to watch (Browse > Video > Play)
Finding videos that fit into your current mood or amount of time to watch
Design and prototype the vision of their tomorrow
After the initial concept testing, the Hello Human design team built out a full clickable Prototype using the Principle prototyping tool, this gave us a more realistic testing framework to capture additional design insights.
The outputs of this research, concept design and validation were compiled and shared to help influence their video-on-demand product delivery roadmap.
Side note: Foster collaboration and ideation with design thinking toolkits
Outside of the research phase, the Hello Human team noticed there were some inefficiencies within the wider product team that were inhibiting the way product, designers and developers worked together. By spending time with different team members we implemented a number of items to help aid discussion and story progression:
Fluid workflows between designers and developers with discussion points between each member of the product team
Decision toolkits to encourage discussions around building the right thing
Base personas and persona cards to keep the personas at the forefront of each decision
Simple ideation sessions that can be run by any team member, e.g. sketching sessions
