Sky TV
Designing an in-app store for a cable TV provider.
(Apr 2019 – Jan 2021)
SKY is one of the largest cable TV providers in Brazil with over 5 million customers. And as such, they felt the need to provide experiences that are more similar to what streaming services are doing. And I helped they do that on the e-commerce side.
It is important to mention that in order to be compliant with the non-disclosure agreement we had, I will not be sharing any business data or any other information that might expose their stragety. Views are my own.
My role
I was the only product designer in a squad full of software engineers. I designed this app working as a consultant @ Accenture, so I constantly managed to stay in tune with business needs with plenty of stakeholders.
Design discovery
Because users were only able to buy channels through the legacy product, which had quite a few engineer issues, we ran on a tight schedule to ship the MVP to production. That means we figured early on in the project, through some various desk research, that there’s a generalized distrust in telecom business. Not only was the app unstable in some areas but it was also a web app, meaning content couldn’t be easily changed.
Apart from desk research, I did a series of User interviews, surveys, guerrillas and so on to afterwards look for data on analytics funnels to find potential bottle necks and increase the funnel. Basically, I followed the money trail.
As part of the design discovery, I mediated a series of workshop sessions to make sure stakeholders were on the same page. That included PMs, marketing analysts, business directors and engineering team to come up with a unified vision.
Business needs
The business was in need of working on some metrics, such as Time to Market and CTR of funnels. Also, it was a must to reduce costs with phone customer service, given users couldn’t figure how to do things on the app by their own.
So we, alongside the product marketing team, came up with strategies to boost sales, some of them being:
1
Cross-sell and upsell sale offers
2
Contextualized sale funnels + UI
3
User-personalized offers and comms
4
Use more content such as trailers
Design process
So, after getting initial user’s insight as well as business needs, I set out to design low-fidelity prototypes and do some guerrilla user testing with some questions in mind, such as:
1) Do users understand the concept of “store” we proposed?
2) Do they feel secure to buy on the app?
3) How can we handle their objections?
I personally find it crucial to make the engineering team part of the user testing process. Therefore, we'd constantly have whiteboarding sessions to come up with solutions that attend to both user's and technology's constraints.
MVP delivery
With all the user input, business needs and engineering efforts mapped out, on the 2nd month of project, we got to design what would be the absolute MVP. We knew it had a lot of room for improvement, but we needed to put the content together asap to iterate.
highlight with contextualized content
sortable quick menu so that users don't spend a lot of time looking for items
personalized recommendations with visuals such as movie posters
Build/Measure/Learn/Share
Once the product was shipped to production, We used H.E.A.R.T. framework to map out the MVP experience from an analytical standpoint as well as qualitative interviews with users who converted and dropped from the funnel.
After figuring out the lessons learned based on metrics, we found that:
1) Users are driven by content and brand;
2) Offering too many product options led users to the paradox of choice;
3) One thing per page experience increased funnel conversion.
Lessons learned from MVP
Following the launch of the MVP, we got to design internal homepages, as seen in the prototype below. As for the homepage, we learned that users didn’t engage much with the highlight banner. Our hypothesis is is that it didn’t look like it was clickable.
The carousel in the bottom, on the other hand, was really well-received by users.
For the other versions, not only did we correct the experience flaws of the MVP but the design system team also implemented a dark version of the app, which came in really handy. On top of that, we designed the home and details page in a way it was 100% content-drive for users to engage and have a sneak-peak of the TV shows and movies.
MVP iterations
Check the interactive prototype
Recommended content base on user profile.
Menu facelift
With the MVP, we found out there were basically two big group of users: those who chose content triggered by brand and other who were attracted by images, videos and their favorite TV show.
So we removed the highlight from the 1st version and adopted this carousel that contemplated best of both worlds: brand and content.
Very few users were hooked to the menu we used in the MVP, but still a few used it, so we chose to keep it but as a strip sort of navigation.
That way, users could filter content and there was a lot more space in the viewport to load images.
Part of our strategy was to include interactive content and even freemium ones.
On the content detail page we got to design a cross-sell with 30-day free trial which boosted the sale of la carte channels.
Interactive content
