Sky Q Show Pages redesign

Sky Q is Sky next generation platform with over 2.5 million homes in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Italy. Following its 4-year initial launch, there was a desire to evaluate the offering to date and improve it across all devices.

So we embarked on a journey to analyse the existing customer experience and take it to the next level, making it richer, more engaging and more seamless than ever before.

As a result we redesigned numerous areas of the UI. Part of which included the show pages.

My role

My role was to lead the vision and the redesign of the show pages.

Part of my responsibility was to create a process that would enable the team to work in an efficient and creative way to achieve:

• an overall richer experience for the user

• a more consistent experience cross the devices

• overcome technical limitations and internal blockers

• propose solutions that are within budget and the delivery timelines

• align with market trends and Sky’s roadmap

My day to day tasks included

• setting the vision, scope and design plan for the new UI

• leading the creative process of redesigning show pages from concept to delivery

• leading a team of UX and visual designers to allocate tasks and review design work

• presenting to key stakeholders and gaining alignment across multiple departments within Sky with varying priorities and objectives

• liaising with lead product, tech and delivery managers to ensure feasibility of the solutions proposed and effective collaboration between teams

• coaching members of the team with best practices on design methodologies and prototyping tools to successfully test ideas

Objectives

The main objectives for the redesign of the show pages were to:

• Increase the impact of titles

• Enable users to quickly resume their viewing of series or part-watched programmes

• Add series level actions and more functionality for series’ viewing

• Better collate all content of a title in a single page, irrespectively to where the user came from (this was fragmented and lacked a user friendly IA structure due to various limitations)

• Enable a UI that would allow future integration of richer metadata, such as cast and crew, extra short video content, tags etc

• Promote onward journeys

Challenges

Some of the challenges we faced were:

• Legacy issues and pre-existing interaction models

• Technical limitations and capabilities in regards to metadata, development time and the desire to achieve a single code-base across devices

• Contractual agreements with partners about how content is displayed and aggregated

• Aligning with other Sky initiatives and products

• Tight delivery plans

Old UI

Series example

Movie example

New UI

Achievements

1. Larger and more engaging hero images

2. Setting the framework for future trailer auto-play

3. Most relevant episode pinned to the top allowing quicker access to playback - smart resume based on viewing history

4. New method of browsing series in rails vs lists - and as a result, fitting more content into the page

5. One destination for series irrespective to delivery mechanism (ie recordings, linear and on demand)

6. No dead ends

7. Widescreen template allowing more content to fit on screen

8. Create a dedicated space for show level actions (vs episodic)

Supporting material

Cross-device work

Wireframes and concept examples

Prototypes

Available to view offline

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