Prime Video dedicated app experience on FireTV. Why?
Prime Video’s deep integration with the FireTV UI is exceptionally confusing to our customers. When customers selected the Prime Video tile on the FireTV home screen, they expected that search, their watch list, and other functionality to be exclusively tied to Prime Video content. When in reality, they were in the FireTV platform layer that aggregated all search results from each content provider, like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Prime Video, within what appeared to be in the Prime Video ecosystem. This also limited customer understanding and appreciation of FireTV’s value as a cross-application content aggregator. Prime Video needed to provide a more independent app experience on FireTV that will enhance both the Prime Video and the FireTV experience.
MY ROLE
Designer
Researcher
CHALLENGES
Diffuse customer confusion and friction between Fire TV and Prime Video experiences.
Guide customers into understanding Prime Video’s value proposition on FireTV.
Create the best in class Prime Video experience.
IMPACT
Conducted customer research and heuristic evaluations that resulted in validating the need for an exclusive, independent Prime Video app experience on FireTV.
Designed the new Prime Video navigation and landing page (home screen) experience.
Influenced the design of the FireTV home screen that is currently live on FireTV.
Above is the original FireTV experience before we added the Prime Video tile. Exclusive Prime Video content was blended in with FireTV's aggregated content library.
Addition of the Prime Video tile on the FireTV landing page. Netflix paid to be the first tile in the row.
Myself and one other researcher conducted a competitive usability test of Prime Video on FireTV (FTV) with 18 participants. The purpose of this study was to identify opportunities to improve the Prime Video experience on FTV.
The study was a systematic qualitative assessment of Prime Video on Fire TV compared to our competitors. Participants performed a set of tasks under one of three test conditions: 1)Comparison of Prime Video across 1st and 3rd party devices [PV on FTV vs. PV on Roku], 2) Comparison of Prime Video to competitive app [Netflix] on Fire TV, and 3) Comparison of PV to competitive app [Netflix] on Roku.
Each test group was made up of participants who had a range of familiarity with the device(s) and service(s) they were evaluating. Participants tested a standard Netflix account and a PV account with an HBO subscription.
To the left are the existing Prime Video designs. To the right are the updated designs I implemented based on the research insights.
Above is the experience I designed for exclusive Prime Video content on the FireTV landing screen that is currently live on FireTV.
The goal of this landing page design is to introduce the customer to content in a simple, digestible manner.
A non-goal is to overwhelm the user with too many choices that instill ‘choice anxiety’. We heard from customers in our research that too many options are stressful, and too much time is spent choosing what to watch and forces customers to want to give up looking for something to watch, so they end up watching nothing at all.
With this design, we start the customer with an elegant, simple, visually stunning interface that focuses on the content, not the UI.