YAHOO VIEW
I led and designed a new video streaming platform in collaboration with Hulu, completing it within an accelerated eight-week timeline from concept to launch.
Launch PR • Techcrunch • Businesswire • Zacks
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| Role | Team | Timeline | Scope |
|---|
| Lead Designer | 1 Design Manager 1 Product Designer (me) 1 Visual Designer 1 Product Manager 1 partial UXR partner 5 front-end, 4 back-end engineers | 8 weeks Late July to August 2016 | Desktop, mweb, iOS app, (Separate Android app designer) |
ROLE
Creative Director
(+ Product Lead for first 3+ months)
TEAM
1 Creative Director, 3 Product Designers,
3 Product Managers, third-party UXR partners
+ front & back-end engineers
(NY, Seattle, Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, Atlanta & Ireland)
TIMELINE
5 months design delivery
12 months to launch
SCOPE
Desktop, mweb, iOS app
(Separate Android app designer)
Timeline
The partnership contract with Hulu was in the process of being drafted. Our goal was to complete the project before signing.
This set a challenging timeline of 8 weeks, which we achieved.
Week 0
Defining the Whats and the Whos
Research
I conducted a competitive analysis and a brief literature review to gather knowledge about basic video-watching behaviors.
Goal
To identify
- What are the table stakes of a video-watching platform
- Who are we targeting?
Assumptions to validate
| Basic Whats |
|---|
| Browse & Discover Find shows Watch stuff Search for something |
| Probable Whos |
|---|
| Existing free Hulu content consumers People looking for something to watch Maybe some bingers Looking for specific/favorite shows |
The MVP Decision
| MVP = Video Watching Tablestakes + Delighter |
Sketched early desktop concepts and started wireframing
Week 1 & 2
MVP Project Planning & All Desktop Wires Completed
Identified
- Focus area goals and deliverables for each day
- What parts engineers can start to investigate and build page infrastructures for
By EOW 2
- Detailed wires for the basic desktop experience defined and turned over to eng
- Review with Hulu to show them proof of concept and what we were planning on building
- Pass the baton to Visual Designer
MVP Planning Whiteboards
Interaction Notes
Completed wireframes
Week 3
Visuals, UXR, Delighter Brainstorm & Prototyping
Skinned wires with visuals
- Worked with Visual Designer to start skinning the wires with a temporary look and feel
- Branding was all still placeholder with hopes that it stays, but no guarantee
UXR Testing
- Worked with UXR Partner to start showing designs to users and get early feedback and perform gut checks
Wires + Visual Design
Delighter Brainstorm
Kicked off a brainstorm to explore delighters to add to the MVP product
Prototype Delighters with Beyond-the-Episode content delivered by the EOW
Week 4
Defining the Mobile App Experience
Initial Plan
Mobile-ify the desktop experience
Challenges
When we saw the actual content returned in the API, we noticed:
- unexpected VERY limited content set available
- full episodes of ONLY anime, K-drama, and British shows
- clips ONLY of major network shows
- still unclear: other shows, movies, trailers, etc
New Mobile App Plan
| MVP App = 1. Watch popular daily clips 2. Watch shows available in app API |
iOS App Wires delivered by EOW
Week 5
iOS App Build Almost Ready To Launch
📱✋ 🛑
Discovery of a Major Problem
The mobile API was finally sent over from Hulu and we discovered that it was missing a lot of content that we had planned on receiving
New Plan
We could have launched as is with the extremely limited content -but the user experience would have been poor since it wasn’t designed for this
We decided to postpone the app launch and rethink the app experience to better fit the content available
Week 6
Continued Desktop QA and
Post-launch Fast Follows
- Worked very closely with Eng to continue QA of the desktop build
- Started post-launch fixes, additional features and iterations
- Watchlists
- Additional Delighters
- After-the-episode experiences
- Fan Reactions
- Interact-able Cast Pages
- Y!Bar Yahoo login integration
- App launch dates were determined
- 9/1 iOS App Launch
- 10/27 Android App Launch
Week 7
CEO Review and Branding Churn
- Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo announced
- More branding churn
- Melissa Meyer review
- → More branding change
- → Visual design updates
- Hulu’s contract was signed
- One last round of UXR
Week 8
Launch!
🚀 🙌 🍾
First 30 Day Wins
4.67M
Unique Video Watchers
90%+
Unique viewers from Yahoo Network (outside of direct)
$$$
Hit projected revenue numbers
(Continued steady revenue until deprioritized and shut down in June 2018 post-Verizon acq.)
COFFEE? TEA? LET’S CHAT!
Additional Details in Person
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