ViX Streaming Platform

Designing an OTT streaming platform for hispanic users living in the US and Latin America.

Overview

As an Experience designer at Globant, I’m the UX Lead of the team that is currently working alongside Univision’s in the design of ViX, the biggest streaming platform for spanish speakers in the US and Latin America.

My role

UX Lead.

September 2021 to present day.

Background

This is an ongoing project which started on September 2021 and has been an incredible ride of challenges and good results that has positioned both Globant and myself as key players within the strategy of creating a streaming service product like this one.

Univision and Televisa, two main companies in the entertainment industry merged as one and gave life to VIX, a product created to provide a free-to-pay streaming service with more than 20k hours of content to watch on-demand. The Project consisted in building brand new apps for Mobile, Desktop, and Connected TV Apps.

As scope, the apps would include +100 Live TV Channels with exclusive Latin content (movies, telenovelas, series, documentaries, news, and sports).


At the beginning, Globant design team worked on the experience for the Roku & Samsung apps (CTVs) in order to have a first MVP release in 3 months. Later, we extended our participation to mobile and desktop requirements by defining flows, wireframes, mockups, prototypes and establishing processes, good practices and strategies for better decision making.


Problem and challenge

The first days of Univision’s project were a little messy.

There wasn’t a defined design process nor a solid research to hold on to, and the prototypes were needed ASAP within a tight roadmap. So, while the team explored designs, the PM, Design Producer and I looked for a way to set a well-defined design process that would help us organize better and also work in collaboration with their design team as well.


As for my role, I proposed a deep research to have a better understanding of our users and from there, come up with a clear user journey, user persona and well documented best practices for big devices design (TVs).

As for user testings, they also didn’t have this key practice within their day to day so as part of this improvement initiative, I took charge of user testings and positioned this practice within the unified process.


Testing type criteria

  • Unguided remote
  • Guided remote
  • Face-to-face

Usability metrics

  • Effectiveness
  • Efficiency
  • Satisfaction

Dive & Research

With the goal of standardizing a basis of knowledge for both the team and myself, and as part of my Diving phase, my first task was to research the following:.

1. Business and system understanding:

  • Desk research on OTT business models, players and demographic data
  • Stakeholder Interviews
  • Best practices for CTV design

2. Online survey for user behavior understanding

  • Distribution between different channels

3. Remote In Depth Interviews

  • Script and questions definition
  • Recruitment coordination with Univision's team
  • Execution with team partner

4. Business studies analysis

  • Univision's studies & reports
  • Online reports found in Desk research


The outcome of this process delivered a solid document with all the information relevant for both Design and Product team, 5 User Personas, a Journey Map and a Content Sitemap.

User persona study

Within the entertainment industry, the most famous business models for streaming products are three: AVOD (Advertisement Video On Demand), which is a free-viewing model, SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand), a paid business model and a Hybrid model, which is a combination of both.

After a rich and complete research process I was able to create 5 user personas by merging all of the information gathered so far. Based on 3 main archetypes, and considering the main contents the product will offer: Live channels, Novelas, Series, Movies, News and Sports.


1. Free only archetype

2. Free-to-pay archetype

3. Paid subscriber archetype



Key findings


  • There is an emotional component for Latino to watching TV live that is not so prominent with streaming.
  • Older viewers (55+) is a growing audience for the AVOD business sector as they tend to use this services as they used cable TV before.
  • Free-to-pay viewers like to pay only for what they want or have interest in and not for complete packages of contents they wouldn’t see.
  • For paid subscribers variety is key and main reason to choose one service from another.
  • For paid subscribers the principal pain is the decision fatigue that implies having so much content to choose.
  • Personalized content display is a must for every streaming product, specially for those who are avid sports consumers.

Free only User persona




Free-to-pay User persona




Paid subscriber User persona



Journey map

With the acquired knowledge from the research process, I created a preliminar journey map with focus on Roku experience, followed by a series of specified Journey for our different User persona, seeking on a better understanding of their possible use of our product.




This deliverable allowed us to:


  • Identify the stages of the experience to see improvement opportunities.
  • Organize the designs screens made so far.
  • Separate the product sections into different flows to distribute for the team to work on.
  • Identify POs responsible of each section for consulting and validation.
  • (For SVOD) conduct a series of workshops for improvement ideas and prioritization.
  • Personalized content display is a must for every streaming product, specially for those who are avid sports consumers.

They also helped to position me and the UX team as key partners of Product.

Design

As first thing, I mapped the complete experience in a user flow and then the wireflow, thinking on an easier distribution within the team and to test it in a fastest and cheapest way. As there was many features to design and test, I put my hands on some of them while I have an overall of all what’s happening in every part of the experience.





1. MKT landing page

  • Information Architecture
  • Help Center

2. EPG channel grid

  • Favorite feature
  • Premium channels
  • Category pills

3. On demand

  • Search
  • Watchlist
  • Sharing
  • Follow feature

4. Register & Payment

  • Registration and Payment steps
  • Plan picker

5. Profile

  • Profile creation
  • Profile administration

Always starting with wireframing, every screen is structured thinking on the proper storytelling and user experience, following the best practices of design for each device and considering industry standards studied with different benchmarks of our list of players to look up to.



Design explorations



Polished UI



User testings

As I took charge of the user testing phase, I developed a strategy that ended up positioning this phase as a must-have for decision and discussing making ideas with the POs. So I tested and reported the results of each feature within the flow, as well as the complete experience as a whole.



The strategy is focused on:


  • Following the defined testing process regardless the size of the initiative to be tested.
  • Measuring Usability metrics.
  • Aligning with POs in the hypothesis creation before setting up the script.
  • Using the proper tool depending on: Type of data to obtain, deadline and size of the initiative
  • Reporting to POs and discussed next steps.

Measuring

As for measurement, once the first release came out (AVOD model) I was asked with the task of proposing a strategy for improvement findings through data analysis.

I prepared a document with a continuos improvement strategy consisting of 4 stages, starting with the Measure phase by reading some information sources, Analyzing the findings and run them through a series of steps with Product for prioritization and definition of next steps.

The improvements initiatives are being guided by the analysis of different sources, identifying what are the users needs, communicate them along with recommendations, planning and execute them with the stabilshed design process.



Steps for Planning phase:


1. Align

Present the findings to the respective owners and discuss the next steps to take on.

2. Prioritize

Improvement opportunities are prioritized according to the criteria defined by the business and the POs.

3. Assign

Prioritized tasks are assigned within Growth or Engagement teams to know which team is going to manage the progress and where the effort is going to come from.

4. Estimate

Once assigned, together with the person in charge, delivery times are estimated, defined and planned within a specific sprint. Implementation times should consider development team.


As a result, we put together a monthly report with which we have been delivering the information obtained with Product, and beginning the planning and execution stages for the evolution of the product recently put in production.

What's comming next?

As this is an ongoing project, we are currently working on the next features that were in backlog and those we've detected are being needed from users so far.

Current work and features to come:

  • Profiles
  • Download
  • Share
  • Favorites
  • Watchlist
  • Chromecast and more.