MY ROLE
Lead UX Designer

PLATFORMS
Android, iOS

YEAR
2017

Quantitative Data

Nickelodeon's analytics team provided robust reporting for measures such asdevice usage, entry points into playback, session length, and character affinity

Qualitative Data

In-person interviews and surveys with parents provided us with key insights for discovery, daily habits and behavior, and browsing. 

"Because kids want to use the Nickelodeon App to interact with their favorite characters and shows, their engagement becomes more focused."

The entry point into content and the analytics that coincided with that gave us a clear indication to focus the first phase of efforts on the character landing pages since our users had a strong tendency to start streams from there.

70% of users select from the character navigation below at session start

"Users only swipe through 3–5 times before moving on to something else"

That "something else" typically resulted in bouncing from the app altogether or switching to a game they were familiar with inside the app.

Qualitative Summary

Key findings from Nickelodeon's Consumer Insights team served as a guide to come up with timeboxed solutions: 

• Users are not always aware of all the new/recently added content that is released on our platforms
  
  
• At this age (9-13 yrs old), kids begin to show more directed search behaviors, and tend to get frustrated more quickly from limited ways to find content.
  
  
• Endless scrolling prevents kids from knowing 'where' they are in the content stream.
  
  
• Adding other ways of sorting/accessing content to allow for other kinds of 'new' content to surface will allow kids to be aware of the full breadth of what the app has to offer.
  
  
• Create ways to change/refresh what kids see more often to eliminate the need for endless scrolling.

Bringing it together with my Product and Engineering partners

After synthesizing the research efforts, I linked up with my Product and Engineering teammates to ideate, brainstorm, and align on our goals which resulted in:

• Expose the full library of content available for each property to increase user perception of the amount of content the Nickelodeon app contains.
• A way for users to be aware of and navigate the larger content catalog without feeling overwhelmed.
• Establish an iterative approach in order to learn and optimize efficiently
  Continue to surface the newest or most recently added content as set by the Programming team.
• Work within a 4 week timeline to roll out an MVP.

Sketching and Flows

With our timeline constraints, our UX team reviewed user entry points that get kids to content fastest and from there we had sketch sessions with product and engineering teams before presenting to outside stakeholder groups prior to committing to dev-ready solutions.

UI + Interaction Solves

We chose to focus on the character landing pages since we knew our primary entry point into playback started from there. The team decided to create a scaleable sub-navigation that allowed kids to filter more easily between content types and update the video player 'Related Tray', so kids could better distinguish between what was currently streaming and what was next in the queue.

©Studio Jüs