ott app builder
Creating a streaming video app is a complex task. People expect it to be difficult! But here I create a plug-and-play solution that allows customers to develop an app in record time-- without a huge dev team!
Creating a streaming video app is a complex task. People expect it to be difficult! But here I create a plug-and-play solution that allows customers to develop an app in record time-- without a huge dev team!
As is often the case in the tech industry, I was assigned a big task that needed to be done QUICKLY. JWP was courting some customers that really wanted to build OTT apps-- you know, like Netflix and Hulu.
These were customers that didn't have big dev teams, so the users of this tool wouldn't have deep technical skills. So the concept, essentially, was to create "a Wordpress for OTT App creation"
Also, it needed to be dev-ready in one quarter!
I knew I wanted the structure of this feature to reference the structure of an actual finished OTT App-- so I researched the visual patterns in well-known OTT apps: Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.
FLOW
Everything that will be visible to the end user in left-hand table
Everything required to deploy the app on the right
Don Norman has convinced me of the power of "mapping": the idea that a thing's controls should mimic the layout of the thing itself.
Since our target customers weren't highly technical, it was important to me that the interface for this feature look very much like a video app you'd find on your TV. So instead of just a list of video collateral, I designed a series of rearrangeable shelves with a title and a strip of thumbnails.
During usability tests, customers understood exactly what they were looking at-- and better yet, how to add and rearrange content!
Content editors have a lot on their plate already, and I really wanted to do anything I could to make their job as easy as possible.
Building an app requires reordering shelves, and the available real-estate on dashboard pages is pretty small. When the user is editing content, peripheral elements like headers and navbars really aren’t important and kind of just create visual clutter.
One problem I have with technical software is that all settings are treated as equals. So often, arrays of "set it and forget it" settings just sit around slowly gathering dust and taking up valuable screen real estate.
The result of this is OUTRAGEOUS VISUAL CLUTTER. The user has to take on an insane cognitive load to find the one little setting they were looking for.
During usability tests, customers understood exactly what they were looking at-- and better yet, how to add and rearrange content!
When this launched, the Broadcast team took its place as JW’s moneymaking furnace. My solution was so good and so simple that we ended up signing WAY more customers than was originally anticipated.