Viaplay

Enabling users to always find what they are looking for

Summary

At Viaplay I was the sole designer in the navigation team called team Gravity. Together we made strategic enhancements across Viaplay's platforms, optimizing navigation elements and content exploration. Through meticulous design iterations and user-focused improvements, we managed to significantly boost user engagement metrics while ensuring a seamless and intuitive user experience for the 7.5 million Viaplay subscribers.

My role:

Product designer, driver of the design system

Team:

Agile product team, design guild

Client:

Viaplay

Date:

May 2022

My approach

I tackled challenges at Viaplay by leaning on an Agile UX methodology, emphasizing iterative design, collaborative teamwork, and data-driven decision-making to optimize the user experience of the product.

Deliveries:

Heuristic analysis, workshop facilitation, rapid prototyping, user testing, pixel pushed design

Tools:

Figma, Figjam, Miro, Hotjar, Maze, JIRA

Introduction

When I joined Viaplay in 2021, the Gravity team was in need of a dedicated designer. Previously, there had been a gap in design support, and the previous designer had a preference for conceptual UI work rather than addressing the navigation challenges. Consequently, the app's navigation system was in a suboptimal state, lacking clarity and user-friendly elements. As the sole designer within the Gravity team, my mission was to overhaul Viaplay's navigation and content exploration. Tasked with improving the user experience across platforms, my focus was on implementing Agile UX methodologies to refine app navigation and streamline content accessibility. Together we created an overarching problem statement and KPIs to meassure success.

Problem statement

"How might we streamline Viaplay's navigation system so that users can effortlessly explore content and enjoy a seamless and intuitive viewing experience?" We will measure our success based on increased playrate and our new KPI, findability rate, which we strive to push to over 70% across all platforms.

Optimizing the navigation

There had been talks forever about re-designing the tab navigation on iOS and move away from the hamburger menu at Android. I lead this change by conducting competitor analysis, workshopping a sitemap structure with my team and user testing the concepts we came up with. The strategic choices we made not only increased the findability rate, tab bar interaction increased by 12%, plus it also significantly reduced reliance on search, amplifying the play-rate by 1%. The play rate is THE BIG KPI, which everyone strives to increase. This win called for good food, beer and karaoke! 🎉

Actors and directors

One of our big breakthroughs when trying to understand our user needs came from insights that showcased a desire to explore content based on specific actors and directors. After in-depth competitor analysis, analyzing existent data and brainstorming sessions, we devised a user-friendly actor page, allowing users to delve deeper into their favorite artists' works. Through A/B testing the people block we saw that the card version of the page led to a remarkable 16% spike in product page engagement.

Category Navigation Overhaul

Revamping the category selector was a strategic move based on user data and competitor analysis. Through rigorous prototyping and user feedback sessions, we're on the verge of introducing a revamped category navigation system set to enhance user exploration and streamline section accessibility. Over a period of three months I created and tested prototypes on all of our available devices, gaining invaluable user feedback that was iterated into the design. This feature is now in development and will hopefully reach our users soon!

Universe and product page re-design

Creating visually appealing universe pages and redesigning product pages significantly improved content visibility and user engagement, resulting in a 9% increase in stream initiation and significant improvement rate when it came to interaction with secondary buttons.

Learnings

Testing early is key, I knew that already but still. We have saved so much development time and brain power by narrowing down our concepts before digging in to the tech.
I thrive in fast moving cross-functional teams. Seeing the impact that we have on the product is awesome!
I like to be all over the place and help out as much as I can wherever I can. It’s fun and allows me to grow as a designer, I just really need to be mindful that my focus stays on the prioritized target.

Now it's time for some SHOTS!