TVme

A handy mobile app designed to help users get the most of all the TV out there.

Project Overview

TVme is a mobile application designed to solve users’ pain points. It was created as part of a two week project at General Assembly.

Switching between streaming platforms and keeping track of all the TV recommendations you’ve been given can be a headache. TVme would allow users to have all their TV needs met in one place, and would make choosing what to watch more enjoyable.

This case study will walk you through my design process, following the double diamond model of discover, define, develop and deliver.

Discover

The starting point for this project was to find a single user’s pain point, and go from there. I began my research by interviewing Cam, who finds he feels overwhelmed when he is choosing what to watch on TV. I put all of the insights from our interview into an affinity map:

Based on this I discerned three key insights:

1. He likes that there is so much choice of TV, but finds choosing what to watch difficult because he has to switch between multiple different platforms
2. He gets ideas for what to watch from multiple different sources, and records these ideas in lots of different places, so when it comes to choosing he struggles to remember these ideas or where to find them
3. He loves talking about shows with his friends, getting their recommendations and watching the same shows as them — but he wishes this wasn’t such a separate process from actually watching TV

Interviewing four more users I added their insights to an affinity map:

I found that they reinforced all of the insights from the original interview, and there were a few additional pain points they had:

1. Too many shows visible on one screen can be overwhelming
2. I’m sometimes put off a platform by adverts or extra costs
3. The huge volume of shows that are promoted by platforms are often bad, samey and not suited to me

Define

I created a user persona to help me refine the key needs and frustrations of my users. Keeping Emma in mind throughout the process would remind me of and help me to empathise with the user I was designing for.

In order to help clarify my insights into a single problem statement, I mapped out Emma’s journey as she tries to choose what to watch.

This brought into focus for me the biggest pain point — flicking between various platforms to find what to watch. Based on this, I defined my problem as:

‘Emma needs a single platform that allows her to watch TV perfectly tailored to her, that unifies all the platforms she subscribes to and all the recommendations she receives, as she currently feels she is not getting the most out of all the TV available to her.’

Develop

With Emma in mind, I began to ideate on a solution:

• Since the main problem was having to flick between streaming platforms, I needed to design an app that unified all the shows from all Emma’s streaming platforms in one place
• Emma struggles to keep track of all her recommendations, and wants to see shows that are tailored just to her, so she would need an app that takes note of her preferences when she sets up an account, as well as while she uses the app
• Emma would also need to be able to refine the list of shows by selecting whether she is happy to watch adverts and extra costs

I mapped a user flow for setting up the app and choosing a show to fit these needs:

I designed a prototype based on this user flow and got three users to test it. An affinity map of the insights I observed from the usability test showed that my users all had the same problems with this initial prototype.

1. They seemed confused by the process of linking streaming accounts to the app

• Following the flow below, the users seemed unsure if they would be able to return to the first of these pages from the third

• As such, in the new prototype I designed a pop up so that the process felt more unified

2. The next insight was that the users struggled to understand and navigate the home feed

• Originally I wanted the main page to be a social media style news feed, where users could interact with their friends about TV, and the app could collect data so it would be more tailored to them

First iteration of social media feed

• But — the main point of the app is to watch TV, and when I asked my users to go from here to the page where they could watch shows, they tried to click on the screen to watch a show from here
• It took all of them a long time to find the play button which would take them to this page where they can watch shows tailored to them
• Based on this, the home page of my second prototype was the watch page, but users can access their newsfeed from the main toolbar

New watch page and social media feed

• I edited some of the buttons on the newsfeed as my users were confused by the function of the original ones, for example misinterpreting the up and down arrows as upload and download, so I changed these to thumbs

3. Lastly, my users found the watch page difficult to navigate

First iteration of watch page (left) and second iteration of watch page (right)

• They weren’t sure where to click to watch something
• Their eyes were immediately drawn to the area where you filter ads and extra costs rather than the shows themselves
• And they wanted to be able to continue watching what they had started, rather than only be able to access new suggestions from the app
• Based on this, I changed the filter section to a filter button which becomes a pop up
• I added a section for the shows you’ve already started
• And I made it clearer how you could actually play a show
• I kept the ‘show me more’ button from the original prototype as this meant the user wouldn’t feel overwhelmed, immediately scrolling through endless shows, but rather would be shown a couple of carefully chosen suggestions

Deliver

Based on this research and various iterations, I delivered the following low-fidelity prototype.

Emma can watch any show she has access to through all of her subscriptions, can see shows carefully tailored to her tastes, and can chat with her friends about her favourite shows and save their recommendations in one place.

Next Steps

In the future I hope to develop the page where Emma can save shows. These could be saved from Emma’s messages and newsfeed, and on this page she could create lists and playlists that could be shared with friends.

What have I learned…

• As my first UX project, this has taught me the importance of research and returning to the user when designing
• It also revealed that, although I found the usability tests of my first prototype difficult to watch as my users struggled to navigate the app, harsh feedback is the most helpful tool in developing a design — it was at this stage of the process where my solution improved most and really began to take shape