The Ask
ABC News was looking to redesign their OTT application experience. They had a beautiful ambitious design but some were concerned the designs were too complicated. UX Engineering was tapped
The Challenges
News can’t use static data to test their users as the constant changing of the news is one of the biggest challenges to designing a news application. Applications like Framer and Principle lack the ability to hook up to an API for dynamic rendering.
Another big concern stakeholders had as a design feature that would keep video and audio playing in the background at all times. This was to help keep the user up to date on the latest news as the stream would go in real-time.
As Real as It Gets
ABC News Prototype in Action
I lead the UX Engineering in leveraging the actual ABC News content APIs and built out a prototype with Swift for tvOS. This pulled in real news feeds and real videos to stream. This helped us test users for real scenarios using real data.
Results
DTCI UX Research put the prototype into testing. Most users did not find the constant stream of video distracting and enjoyed it. Some users found challenges in the constant video stream. One user remarked that having no ability to stop the video while browsing for other content was a struggle, specifically stating concern over her children seeing depressing or graphic news stories.
Overall stakeholder teams were more confident in the design after user testing and decided to move forward with the ambitious design with minimal changes. These designs are at the time of this writing currently in production.