Modern TV

Problem

DIRECTV’s experience for its 22million customers was getting stale. Customers found it difficult to find engaging programs to watch. DIRECTV’s value of service to customers was dropping. How do we invigorate the experience and increase DIRECTV’s value of service to users from their existing subscription?

My Approach

Drafted a creative brief, assembled a cross-functional team of designers, researchers, prototypers, developers and architects.

Identified opportunities to improve design by translating user pain-points through ethnographic studies and in-lab contextual inquiries. I leaned strongly on the in-house research team to gather these insights.

Prioritized user pain points by qualitatively evaluating them against Desired Experiences that the research team had fine-tuned for video entertainment.

Created opportunity themes by combining results from competitive and affinity analysis on the high priority pain-points.

Set the Product Goals and Design Principles after partnering with the research team, designers from our studio, architects, developers and product managers.

Product Goals:

Fresh & personalized content
One place to find content
Modern look and feel
Familiarity across devices

Design Principles:

Don’t break what works
Don’t confuse content from settings
Keep users oriented and in content
Present relevant content in digestible chunks
Reduce decision points to find more content

Iterated through site-maps, interaction models and partnered with a team of visual designers to define a new language for visual design for the entire experience.

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Refined the design iterations across 200+ hours of in-lab studies with 169 participants. Key takeaways:

Delivered the detail design in the form of wireframes, annotation, pattern libraries, visual designs & specs and copy.

Spearheaded Product Management efforts for this project. Some of my achievements:

Delivered business cases, cost estimates and a launch roadmap.
Gathered customer feedback after launch by partnering with field, care and social media teams.
Created a framework to triage customer complaints and inform product roadmap to further improve the experience.
Transferred knowledge and responsibilities to AT&T’s Product Management team after DIRECTV was bought.

Result

Led the strategy, design, delivery and product management of the current entertainment GUI for 18M DIRECTV subscribers.

Product Design Lead