Freely
Futerproofing live TV for the streaming age.
User interface and conceptual design for TV
Project overview
Freely came to us wanting a fresh concept for their aggregator 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 to think a little bit more blue sky and implement a whole new visual identity that felt modern and bright.
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 the IA
We first organised the main navigation into sections and fleshed out the IA and what each page could include needed to consider.
Home needed to be 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 that hadn’t been claimed by any competitors and could help Freely stand out fro the crowd. We decided that purple was a good choice as it felt premium and allowed for a flexible color palette.
We had both experienced cases where brand colors were created with out user interfaces in mind so we knew we had to ensure we had multiple shades of our core brand color for contrast and accessibility.
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.
Source visibility
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 contents. we also enhanced the TV guide with FAST channels, allowing you to really see the breadth of content available.
TV Guide and FAST channels
With the inclusion of FAST channels, the design of the TV guide had to be easy and efficient, displaying information that the user needs at a glance and allowing for more information to display in an expanded view, on delay.
How can we keep users engaged?
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 which 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.
Highlighting Live TV further, i created exit screens to highlight upcoming popular content. If a user was about to exit, we would surface this content from one of there most top 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 can we enhance the experience to be more engaging and utilise the ‘in the moment’ feeling of watching something as it happens.
A shoppable experience
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.
What’s everyone watching?
Using the mechanic of profiles, users would be able to see what their friends and famil are watching on a dedicated rail on Home.
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.