Futerproofing live TV for the streaming age
Project overview
Freely came to us wanting a fresh concept for their aggragater service. They wanted to be the one stop shop for all of the biggest streaming services and their content. Freely had initial designs, with a full navigation and pages mapped out. We were tasked on thinking a little bit blue sky - how can we push users to gravitate to Freely, and not an individual service like iPlayer or ITV? How can we keep them there?
We were a small team working on this pitch. It was a Junior Designer and I working on the UI, along with a Design Director leading the pitch. We had a pretty open brief, and freedom to create our own visual branding.
Planning
We organised the main navigation into sections and fleshed out what each page could include and what we needed to consider.
Home needed to the go-to destination for the user to find live and VOD content. We wanted this to be more than just a classic homepage of rails and more of a hub that had quick jump-off points to the users favourite or most watched content.
Shaping the brand
We had free reign with coming up with a brand color and logo for our pitch so we wanted to choose carefully. Our core brand color needed to be something hadn’t been claimed by any competitors and could help Freely stand out fro the crowd. We decided that purple was a good choice and went with a vibrant Cadbury style shade for our core brand, as well as a deeper purple we could use on on UI.
We had both experienced cases where brand we created with out user interfaces in mind so we knkew we had to ensure we had multiple shades of our core brand color for contrast and accessibllty.
Our motion designer came up with an easily animated logo consisting of three shapes that resembled the letter ‘F’.
Home sweet home
Home needed to feel like a one-stop-shop for your favourite things. Live content from you favourite channel, your last watched content, suggestions and highlights should all be ready available.
With TV products, your constrained by d-pad navigation which means lots of up and down actions to find what you want. Having a dynamic rail allows for less manual user behaviour to get to what you need.
We made sure it was easy to know where your content was coming from. Adding a app icon to content card allowed for non-disruptive design while also calling out content source.
Highlighting apps and their content was paramount in giving users a truly integrated experience. We did this by having app-specifc rails with jump off points and top content, as well as designing a TV guide with FAST channels, allowing you to really see the breadth of content available.
Apps
TV Guide
With the inclusion of FAST channels, the design if the TV guide had to be easy and efficient, displaying on information that the user needs at a glance, and allowing for more information to display in an expanded view, on delay.
We wanted to show a complete experience, with ways to keep user in the app and watching more. One way to do this is with end screens whoch can be used to show whats up next.
We went a step further and created a full screen immersive experience using artwork. Not only does this highlight what was up next on the current channel, but what was up next on other channels too.
How can we keep users engaged?
Highlighting Live TV further, exit screens were utilised to highlight upcoming popular content. If a user was about to exit, we would surface upcoming content from one of there ,most favourite channels. This not only shows the user that we ‘know’ them, but also keeps them engaged with the service.
Future Vision
We started to think towards the future of Live TV - how ca we enhance the experience to be more engaging and utilise the ‘in the moment’ feeling of watching something as it happens.
Shows like Love Island feature items related to the show like water bottle that make the user feel like they are immersed in the experience. What if we could highlight those items as they appear live. Using interactive ads, we can highlight points of purchase within the live show.
A shoppable experience
Using the mechanic of profiles, users would be able to see what their friends and famil are watching on a dedicated rail on Home.
What’s everyone watching?
Final pitch
On our final pitch the client gave us great feedback around some of the feature we introduced. They said it felt seamless and built for the future. It was great being able to conceptualise without having too many constraints around functionality or brand and was a very different experience to working on larger, more established projects.