Web Content on TV

“A large part of a design’s success relies on designer's ability to adapt the design process to fit the broader timelines.”

How it all began

DIRECTV brand is synonymous with best-in-class  sports, movie, and tv show experience. However, with the sudden spur in web and mobile technology, an entire new crop of content has emerged.  This content genre exists solely on mobile devices and web browsers solely. 

A few years ago, I was assigned to a relatively small research & development project. The goal was to build a prototype for playing this "web" content on a 10-foot device (with the end goal of bringing this content to our uses). 

I was the design lead for this project…

My Initial Reaction 

While I was excited to be a part of this, my initial reaction was that this was solely a technology driven approach. And from an experience point of view, we have two key tasks ahead of us –

Understanding the content type

Understanding the users who consume this content

Humanizing the Content 

Other than consulting on the POC initiative, my first exercise was to better understand the life cycle of this content. We started off with some light level user stories.

I also partnered with my research lead and started a user interview initiative. Since video aggregation was at the core of what we were doing, we targeted individuals who were avid tv watchers, consumers of web videos and have used at least one aggregation service (Flipboard, Reddit, Sonos).

Competitive Landscape 

We then got hands-on with the key apps in this space to better understand the competition.

The Product-Design Strategy 

Having some understanding of this space, my product counterpart and I asked ourselves if there is a unique solution that we can play to our strengths. We whiteboard-ed for ours. And then some more. At the end, we presented a our combined strategy deck to our leadership.

This helped us define a cohesive product-design roadmap and answered key questions like –

• Why we want to play in this space

• What are some unique opportunities we have, as it relates to our users, as well as

• What's the design framework for this content

From Strategy to Execution… 

Wrapping Up 

I worked very closely with the engineering and QA teams, attending their stand-ups, scrum meetings, and holding regular design review sessions with the key stakeholders. All this was done to ensure that the final product stays aligned with the design, and that the details of the designs were well understood. This was a two-way process as there was ongoing feedback from the team and the leadership on the final design, and details of the design was constantly iterated upon (and tested, depending on the change).  

After quite a few months of hard work, I am glad to say that this product is out in the market has met with generally positive reviews. As with anything, there were a few things that we should have done, but were unable to, due to resource constraints. But I guess that’s what the V2 is for...  

Thank You!