UX & Product Design > Corus> Global TV iOS App

A new app for the digital age

With the launch of the iPad, a new digital age of streaming had begun. It was up to my team to lay the digital foundation in an otherwise traditional broadcasting environment. 

The Problem

Build a brand new app within the confines of a broadcaster’s normality’s including rigid time slots, advertising and a lack of direct user feedback. With such chartered new territory came the difficult task to convince upper management that users decide when and where they want to consume content in this new digital first age.

The Solution

Research, and lots of it. Alongside business analysts and a UX researcher, we dove into the data and gathered insights from site metrics and real users. We hosted live survey sessions where we had one-on-one conversations with fans of our content. We also looked at how Netflix and other streaming services built out their new content delivery apps. With all the information at my fingertips, I got to work. 

I want to watch what I want, when I want to.

The launch of the iPad was a turning point for streaming at Corus/Shaw and across the industry. People’s viewing habits were shifting—prime-time was giving way to watching whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. As a major broadcaster, we needed to keep up.

I had recently redesigned and launched the new GlobalTV.com website, which was a big success. But there was still a missing piece—subscribers couldn’t stream their content on demand.

At the time, cable and satellite subscribers could only watch their shows on TV. Meanwhile, streaming platforms like YouTube and Netflix were growing fast, proving that the future was all about accessibility. So, we set out to change that by creating a new app that would let users log in and stream their favourite content anytime—even live TV. This technology would also make its way to the new .com website aswell.

On top of adding authentication, we had to revamp the app’s design and make sure everything was ready for launch. Time to get to work!

UX Mockups & User Testing

I traditionally designed responsive websites before tackling this project, so it was a fun learning experience to build an app. I finally could focus on just one or two devices instead of having to take multiple screen sizes and resolutions into mind. I studied the iOS design guides and got to work building out a very basic framework for the app. 

Since users were already watching TV and consuming media on the recently redesigned website, I wanted users to feel at home when they launched the new app. A big ask was the ability to favourite shows or clips. 

From data gathered from testing, we found users generally had a few favourite shows and would often skip the main page. They would find their content via the shows page, skip to their favourite, and begin consuming content.

Part of my mandate was to solve this major issue and offer our viewers a customized homepage and favourites section where they could easily filter and find the content they wished to view quickly and efficiently.

I worked closely with the content authoring team to find a happy medium between allowing users to find their favourite shows and clips easily, without closing off the rest of the GlobalTV catalogue. As part of their mandate was to curate lists of videos to capture new viewers for shows that were under performing, or not as popular as the show runners.

After initial drawn paper mockups had been created and tested by the team, we recreated them in Balsamiq and began our live user-testing journey. 

After a very fun and successful live user test, we gathered the feedback, analyzed it and made our changes. After retesting several more times, we knew our foundation was solid and began the production side of the redesign.

Design Efficiency

As I mentioned before, I had recently relaunched the GlobalTV.com experience to great success. Part of my redesign included a design production flow that would allow graphic designers to follow a template, ensuring consistency between our pages and to lessen the amount of work one designer had to do daily.

The production flow can be broken down as follows :

I simplified this flow by building the website and app in layers. Each webpage and app page would have the same background, logo and floating cast member section – allowing for sharing of assets. This reduced the production of each show page sometimes by days, as some shows were very content rich where others were more simple. ( Survivor vs Days of our lives, for example ) This also allowed us to enrich the page designs with parallax scrolling effects.

Wrapping it all up

Immediately after launch, our app rating skyrocketed from 2.5 to 5. Naturally, our team was ecstatic at the results of nearly a year of solid, hard work.

Users thanked us for taking the time to listen to feedback and implement features they had been asking for. On the other hand, there were a set of other users that did not favour the redesign, stating that change was bad and they were used to the old way.

Change is a normal part of ux, and I can always appreciate when someone does not enjoy an experience I have crafted. In a future update, we added a “getting started” guide for new users that outlined all the new features and how to use them.

On to the next one!