Background
A television network was looking to launch a local 24x7 streaming station over Fire TV connected devices as a way to broaden their audience.
Goals of the Project
With only a few weeks to launch, we needed a way for producers to manage a schedule of live and on-demand content with its streaming video technology.
The Challenge
Traditionally, at the beginning of an effort, software teams engage in discovery and framing, and product development typically starts after inception. This approach, however, would not have allowed the network to hit its launch date. To solve for this, we began discovery and framing in parallel with development.
Personas
We initially identified two distinct personas to focus on: "Paula" the Producer and "Larry" the Live Operator. The team developed proto-personas to validate during interviews.
Service Blueprint
The designers conducted a service blueprint workshop to help visualize and understand the touch points and systems involved in scheduling streaming events. Although typically used to model an already existing process, we knew enough about what the process could look like so that we were able to get the basic workflow mapped out.
This initial service blueprint was only for the happy path scenario. As needed, the team could develop edge cases: breaking news, video on demand, and other scenarios that may not follow this path.
Design Studio
After the team completed the service blueprint exercise, we all felt that we had ideas on how the users (Paula) would interact with the scheduling tool. Designers led a design studio with the full balanced team to generate and explore ideas. We were able to gather many unique concepts and start designing!
Initial designs
Interview Topic Map and Prioritization
In order to prepare for the interviews that would take place in Burbank the week of March 9th, designers needed to capture and organize questions. We gathered the PMs and designers together with our key stakeholder and conducted a silent generation and affinity mapping exercise. We then prioritized the groupings and generated a topic map.
Interviews and Prototype Testing
The PM and I headed to Burbank, CA to spend the week interviewing the team in the office responsible for the 24x7 streaming channel.
All of our interviews were 60 minutes long and we split the interview into two parts: 45 minutes discussing the questions that we generated in our Topic Map and 15 minutes getting feedback on the prototype.
We were also able to see where and how the team worked on a daily basis, key context for the development of the application!
Interview Synthesis
Many times we hear things, individually, in different ways. Doing this synthesis as a team allowed us to discuss those points of view and create a shared understanding.
Since we were in full remote mode at this time due to COVID we completed our synthesis using Miro.
We organized our individual feedback, then grouped similar items to create an affinity mapping.
We organized our individual feedback, then grouped similar items to create an affinity mapping.
Based on the initial research, we iterated on the design to show how users could rapidly include breaking news into their scheduled programming.
The engagement was put on hold after four weeks because of the global Coronavirus outbreak and the financial impact to the network.
However, in four weeks together we:
Delivered a product that met the client’s need for the initial launch of the 24x7 streaming channel
Created a roadmap of future development guided by sound research and user feedback
Successfully navigated a slight twist on a traditional labs style project
Gained strong trust and buy in from the client by delivering early and iterating quickly!
Demo of working software