Overview

Stakeholders

N/A; just a personal case study

Note: Within the rest of this page, I will use “Client” to refer to Apple TV (even though they aren’t officially my client, since this was a personal case study).

Research Goals

Understand Wants And Needs Of Client's Audience –

• Uncover participants’ pleasures of Client’s current website, and

• Identify key pain points shared by participants as they view Client's pre-existing webpages.

Competitive Analysis

To understand how Client stands with competitors, I gathered desktop data from both Client and four of Client's competitors.

The importance of competitive analysis is to see content/design that Client either has (or doesn't have) in relation to Client's competitors.

Key Insight

Below are the most important key insights gathered from the competitive analysis of the four competitors’ websites.

This helps get a better idea of what kinds of interview questions to ask interview participants, in order to gain more understanding of how participants both positively and negatively perceive Client's designs.

Note: This deliverable was created using Figma.

Interviews

After analyzing the results of how Client compares with the four competitors, I searched for applicable participants who fit the Client’s persona.

Note: This deliverable was created with Adobe XD.

Key Insight

Below are the key insights found, from the analysis of the interviews.

The most important insights from these interviews are also mentioned in the empathy map in the define phase.

Persona

After assessing and analyzing the research findings, I created a primary persona, to define a realistic customer and user of Apple TV’s products and features.

Empathy Map

After analyzing the responses, actions, thoughts, and feelings from participants in the research study revolving around Client's desktop and mobile application, I put together an empathy map, which highlights the greatest and most impactful findings, from:

1. Says: What participants say about their experience while viewing Client's website/application(s).

2. Does: What participants do on the website/application(s).

3. Thoughts/Feelings: How participants think/feel about certain pages/content/navigation.

4. Views/Hears: What participants see/hear in different types of content.

5. Pains: How participants experience different pains/difficulties, while using the website/application(s).

6. Gains: When participants experience a fruitful/positive end goal.

The empathy map helped to gage what main concepts to keep in mind, prior to starting to sketch out the redesigns of the web pages.

User Flow

This user flow provides the many possible steps that a customer can make on Client's website, in order to reach the end goal of navigating to an episode of The Office.

Note: This deliverable was created with Adobe XD.

UX Research Summary

Key Highlights From UX Research

Research-Backed Findings/Suggestions:

• Create a button in the right-hand side of the screen, for the sign-in link.

  • Explanation: Interviewed participants found it difficult to find the sign-in link on the desktop version (was on the left-hand side of the nav bar, through a dropdown).

• Add a Seasons dropdown for each TV show.

  • Explanation: Interviewed participants wanted the different seasons for TV shows to be split into sections in a dropdown (during this UX Project, Apple TV had "Season 1" listed at the top of the page, even though it was displaying all of the series for The Office. Plus, even more confusing, was that all of the seasons were being displayed in sequential order on that one page).

• Add a high-level overview of each episode, right next to the corresponding episode.

  • Explanation: Interviewed participants wanted to either know the premise of each episode before viewing, or a reminder of the premise of each episode, if they were searching for an episode that they had already streamed.

• Make the media viewing page on the same page/window as the original Apple TV (iTunes) page.

  • Explanation: Interview participants expected the streamed episode to still be displayed on the Apple TV desktop app, but just on a different page (instead of popping up a whole new box/window).

• Create Next in Queue page.

  • Explanation: Interview participants mentioned that since they often like to watch a TV show from the first episode until the last one, they enjoy being notified about the episodes that are next in queue, once they finish each episode.

• Create Resume page.

  • Explanation: Interview participants wanted a page to exclusively display each of the individual media content that they hadn't finished viewing.

Retrospective

Challenges

Although I definitely understood that Apple TV had severe deficits with regards to how it was designed (based on my own experience, in addition to negative reviews of how users were able to stream TV Shows), I still had to gain an understanding if that is generally how the base population feels.

Luckily, my interviewed participants’ thoughts about their experiences lined up with what I had read on the reviews.

Next Steps

What’s next?

Understanding the participant’s preferences and expectations with streaming services, provided a great starting point. I had clear ideas of concepts to keep in mind once I started on the mid-fi wireframes for the design phase of this UX project.

Please go to the next page to see the redesign phase (UX Design - Apple TV).