Project: TWC TV
A Cohesive Television Experience On Every Platform
Deliverables
Ideation, Strategy, Design
Collaborators
TWC UX Team
TWC TV is Time Warner Cable’s Mobile IP based television product. It spans 14 different platforms and growing. The project first launched on the iPad in 2010 and we were the first to deliver Live TV on mobile and web platforms. Version 1.0 supported 17 channels of Live TV on day one and has grown to over 600 and counting. Originally the service was a “value add” and included within our customers cable subscription. Today customers are able to buy a data package and add TWC TV without subscribing to the larger traditional cable service, at a fraction of the cost. The apps have grown from solely supporting Live TV to supporting On Demand, Full Guide, Channel Browsing, Remote DVR Management, Parental Controls, Accessibility Controls, and Search.
Business Challenges
1. Despite providing more content than any of our competitors, customer feedback is poor and they indicate that there is "nothing on”. These people are opting out of the service.
Hypothesis: Improving overall user experience will expose more content and improve discovery. Providing an improved value proposition and overall view of the product.
2. There are more ways to consume content than ever before. Our competition is delivering this content to people in new and innovative ways.
Hypothesis: Improve delivery of video by taking a “go wide” approach, supporting as many platforms as possible. While maintaining quality and affordability
Design Challenges
1. Build a modern, cohesive experience across a variety of platforms and device types that fundamentally improve the value of our product and service
2. Improve our research and understanding of our customers. How do we support a wide variety of user persona’s and use cases while still attempting to modernize our experience and leverage new and emerging technologies?
3. Design with data in mind. Our legacy products only support operational data. We needed to add experiential data and tools as we developed new products. Then establish a culture that understands how to evaluate and act on this new information
User Centered Design
Our teams approach to developing TWC TV is centered around the customer. Our premise is that if we start by empathizing with a given range of customers, the products that we design and develop will be relevant to those people upon release. Even if we are forced to compromise our original vision, due to any number of business or technical limitations.
Our role within the company is to gather or conduct customer research, business requirements, and work within engineering to understand the current and future architecture that is under development. From there we employ a Lean UX strategy and design quick iterative ideas that we then use to gather feedback and quickly test in a variety of ways.
Once we are confident in our prototypes we refine and work directly with our engineers to develop these ideas and then eventually release them. Upon release we then gather data feeding that information back into the design process
Design Spectrum
TWC TV has an extremely broad customer base forcing us to divide the app in key areas, and then develop use cases around those customers and their features. This was a challenge in that we had to account for all types of users within one app. Rather than the traditional method of focusing our app on a key demographic, developing use cases, persona’s, and then limiting the feature set for the needs of those people
Improved Navigation
Traditional set top boxes have relied on the remote control and have limited navigational capabilities. This constrains our legacy products and forces an inherit limitation the feature set. One of the primary goals for TWC TV was to leverage these new platforms hardware and software capabilities to allow for a more holistic and well designed navigation experience. The goal here was allow the customer to move around the app and discover content in a way that wasn’t possible traditionally. As a result the hope was that improvement in discovery would expose the value of the subscription
Live TV Design Evolution
TWC TV is intended to provide the customer and key stakeholders within the company a single, branded customer experience across all of our platforms. We then take the different challenges across those platforms. Attempt to improve them and then work those ideas back into the experience on other platforms. An example of this is our Live TV redesign. I redesigned the live experience to accommodate for a number a key pain points, that customers had requested. Recent channels, stronger layout, better filtering, search, and additional information about a given show that would be accessible at any time. We also improved the mobile experience to incorporate how a user might be holding a given device while navigating through the catalogue
Lean UX Design & Iteration
Live TV Design Progression v1.0 - Current
Mobile Live TV Design Progression v1.0 - Current
Remote Management & Connected Devices
TWC TV supports viewing features accessible both in and outside of the home. We did extensive research focusing on core mobile use cases across a number of different persona's. Then worked toward a viable first instance of this new capability.
Part consumption, part management, the ability to simply hand the device to a child or open the app in line at a coffee shop led us to make a number of design changes while the apps were being used outside of the home. This research also led to a number of key business evolutions and has allowed us to offer a unique experience to our customers that was previously impossible for us to provide.
I worked extensively on remote management, including a best in class remote DVR Management System that allowed customers to schedule, edit, refine, delete, and understand their connected devices. This required extensive development of our core architecture and the way we worked with our legacy systems. This was also key to allowing TWC TV to be truly mobile, and allowed us to connect the devices on an account level for the first time. Although there is certainly work to do, and the feature itself may seem less interesting on the surface, being able to move content between TWC devices is an essential building block for future development.
