2023
My List
My List is a feature seen on almost all major streaming services. It enables the user to add movies and TV to a “list”; a dedicated page to store content they have selected. We wanted to explore how this feature could go above and beyond the standard protocol.
Context
The current My List feature replicated the industry standard. It also had poor UX when it came to content management and expectations for influence across the app. See the current experience below.
Goals
Re-evaluate the My List feature and how we might improve it in order to increase user engagement and time spent watching.
Discovery
We started our discovery process by conducting qualitative user research and comparative analysis, as well as gathering relevant data from P+. This helped us gain clarity around what areas of My List to focus on and identify the level of effort vs. impact of improvements.
Comparative Analysis
Virtually every streaming service has an identical 'My List' experience. Instead of looking to what our competitors did, I looked at different products outside the streaming space and how they allowed users to curate their own lists and save things for later. You can see my findings below.
User Research
As there was a standard experience across the board for 'My List', we wanted to understand how people used this feature and what they might find lacking. With a small pool of 10 people, we asked them to go to their favorite streaming service and get their insights into the 'My List' feature. You can see my findings below.
Workshop with Product
After consolidating findings from our research, I presented to the product teams and ran a workshop to help generate a problem / opportunity statement, as well as plot out ideas based on their level or effort and level of impact.
Final Designs
After everything, I began to work within the design solution space– using the workshop as reference to help build an MVP plan as well as look at solutions that pushed beyond.
Blue Sky Designs
In collaboration with product and engineering, I identified features that would impose the highest impact. The designs below show the most paramount design solutions (pun intended). In exploring these, some features, such as the top section, would be easy to implement as we had existing frameworks for them. Others, such as 'Enhance My List', would require higher dev effort.
Enhance My List
One of the design solutions explored was a way for users to 'enhance' their existing list. Thanks to our qualitative user testing and comparative analysis, we identified that surfacing more ways for users to discover similar content to what they love was a highly desired feature.
Toast Message Component
This was one of the first components I contributed as a designer at Paramount. We were able to revisit it during this project, update it, and add definition in our design system.
Retrospective
Ultimately we were only able to launch our MVP solution the My List feature. This enabled users to more easily add and remove content, but we could not measure this according to our KPI of hours of content watched. If I could go back in time, I would of gathered more buy in from leadership and focused on a MMP (minimum marketable product), rather than our 'Blue Sky' solution.
