Redesign to become digital first

The Task: To create a new digital experience for TVO Today on both the web and two custom built, iOS and Android apps

The Client: TVO

My Role: UX Designer and Researcher

Skills involved: user research, usability testing, affinity diagram, customer journey mapping, interaction design, prototyping, wireframing

Tools: Figma, Adobe Suite (XD), Miro

Timeline:  1 year for major release - ongoing iterations & improvements

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Web

Outlining the initial wireframes for web

many wireframes were made to see how best to maximze the variety we have and create balance. When on the home page, the opportunity to maximize our users at the first touch point was critical and took a great focus to outlining the proper flow

Improving Article Engagement 

One major issue we noticed was that the articles that we present could be better optimized. Oftentimes, they would be long, lack any structure or defining features that would break up the page and make it easier for people to read or understand in less than 10 secs. Using data from heatmaps and recordings, we saw that users also felt this way. 

Reformating and optimizing article presentations

We studied different formats but ultimately, we wanted to have clear focus with the headlines. Bold and clean typeography was chosen, and images were stacked optimizing responsive screen formats. Based on sharing patterns, we also wanted to leverage social platforms such as LinkedIn and Reddit more prominently. 

Highlighting our breadth of content

As we learned In our user interviews, the lack of organization and hierarchy of content impeded with our users desire to engage with TVO articles. In fact, the presence of only “latest articles” impeded their desire to discover content because they couldn’t find the topics and sections that interested them.



Easy Wins - Revamping the Homepage Experience

In our first phase, we revamped the main homepage to serve a more balanced presence to topics and types of content TVO offers. Instead of featuring only a high volume of latest articles, we’ve paired down the amount of content featured, instead creating more visual, minimalistic layouts that highlight the quality of the content as well as our flagship programs and features we want to highlight

Future Wins - Curated Topics and Subtopics

Leaning in from insight from users and editors, developing the site to handle more curated topics will create more depth into the reporting TVO can do and will ensure timely topics, both short term and long term, can be highlighted and featured, creating a more personalized, nuanced and flexible current affairs experience 

Streaming Discoverability

TVO hosts a wide selection of documentaries and series however major issues impede its usability. While the content catalog is diverse, often titles don’t appear on the site and are hidden due to the sites indirect navigation and lack of organization. At the same time, the video experience is distracting with a cluttered interface that puts attention on everything except the content the user is watching.

Creating a more welcoming and cinematic experience

66% of People people we interviewed identified that they had hard time knowing what TVO does and don’t automatically think of TVO to watch Documentaries and series. At the same time, the respondents identified that they like binge watching shows, from platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video and Twitch. 

Part of our solution was to bring that same cinematic experience to TVO.org, promote greater content recall by using poster images of documentaries and series, showing the vast amount of content through carousels and curated blocks while introducing a more intuitive navigation system that gets users finding content faster and more. 

Organized Show Pages and Video Player

Show and video pages also received an update. In particular, we structured the data, the video player and added new features that we identified through surveys and respondents that fit into the theme of

Streamlined and Intuitive

With these fixes, we were able to significantly reduce the journey taken to view content and make a more straightforward experience for users so that they can enjoy content faster.

Future enhancements

Over time, we will be tracking performance of each section and analyzing our Google Analytics to see what percentage of our audience we can retain and attract. One of our next priorities is to enhance the performance of the section and enhance it so that page times will decrease, and show titles can appear faster and more frequently when users browse.

Since we are one of the few providers that offer transcripts, described and closed captioning within our video experience, I would love to find a way to see if we can improve and create a more unified version for our users. Accessibility features have definitely helped bring unexpected benefits to the traffic that we see, especially international, and it would be interesting what we can do to leverage that insight. 

Other potential improvements:

  • Building an iPad specific app
  • Sign In
  • Live Stream
  • Voice Generated Articles & Downloads

Credits

Eric Hanson - UX Research, UX Design

Van Shaw - UI Design


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⬅  Part 1

Using Format