About VRV

The anime streaming website is so overwhelming so lets fix that.

VRV is an over-the-top streaming service launched in November 2016 owned by Otter Media, a subsidiary of AT&T's WarnerMedia. The service bundles together anime, speculative fiction and gaming related channels and the service targets these large fandoms.

The purpose for doing this project was to show the design with better clarity, discoverability, and seamless experience in every feature to show the subscriber that VRV is worthy to have.We basically focused on conducting research, usability improvements, and re-working the user interface to better display available content.

UX Challenges

Although VRV looks visually good its problem lies in organizing the content and the information on the homepage.The search option often takes too much time to deliver the results and thus the users are unable to get the full experience in discovering the content and purchasing the membership.

What we need to do is to help the users get to their content quicker without presesnting them with too much content.

User Research

We spoke to 16 people that used streaming platforms to understand behavioral patterns while watching VRV versus the site they always use. 50% of participants were direct users, they enjoyed watching animated content. But to our surprise, all participants were new to VRV.The survey also shows that only 2 people out of 51 are familiar with VRV.

Findings from Interviews :

  • Search Funcion is really important ,it is the first thing that people use when they find their shows .

  • So about 80 % of the people complained about category and scrolling time on the VRV.

  • Almost all the users had a hard time finding the next episode while watching .

  • 85 % of the users use the website while straming on VRV.

    • What the interviews taught us

    Keep it simple: Most users found the homepage overwhelming and had difficulty finding content, they were also confused by how the content was curated

    Work less: Most users did not enjoy the amount of scrolling required, they expressed concern for the level of work needed to explore the site.

    Search first, wander later: There were unmet expectations of the search bar, users found the search ability to be too limited. Most users circled back to the homepage when their searches were not successful

    Competitive Analysis

    By taking our user’s pain points, we conducted a competitive analysis focusing on what other competitors have done right in comparison to our platform.We dug deeper into the 12 alternative platforms that our interviewees shared. These platforms included: Netflix, Apple TV, Crunchyroll, Youtube, Disney Plus, Prime Video, Hulu, Gogoanime, KissAnime, Curiosity Stream, Twitch, and Discovery+

    Implementing card sorting and red routes to analyze the opportunity and pain points

    As we have taken a large no of competitors and because of that the data that we have received is very big so we have utilize card sorting method to analyze the findings we got. We implemented card sorting to categorize similar positive and negative findings from our competitor. To keep in mind, we will use the positive findings as opportunity, and avoid the negative findings as pain points. The team utilized red route to prioritize user needs and build the most valuable feature based on pain points

    Implementing card sorting and red routes to analyze the opportunity and pain points

    Solution using Design

    We began with making low fidelity designs to solve current problems. This low fidelity were designed based on each flow the user have to finish their goals. Afterwards, we were finished with the low fidelity. We have a built in design system. This design system uses the atomic design method.

    Filling the Gaps which were present in VRV

    Redesigned VRV homepage

    Introduce Content Genres

    One of the main problem was that the users were able to find content if they were given it’s title, but when they wanted to look for something new to watch they would often turn to genres or rely on recommendations, both features do not currently exist in VRV

    Video showing user searching for “comedy”, “action”, and “romance”.Current search has no genres tagged, so it only displays show titles with related word

    Reducing Vertical Scrolling

    The current homepage design uses an “endless vertical scroll” to attract users to explore new content . This is an engaging way to interact with content, but it is too much work for the users.

    Video showing user scrolling down homepage feed

    Protoype for mobile

    Reflections

    1. Do not fall in love with the first solution you come up with. Keep iterating. Sketch out even the ideas you think are unusual/odd. Sometimes unusual ideas can inspire you to come up with ideas for the final product.

    2. I know it can be super exciting to start off designing screens but it is vital to have your flows & wireframes/sketches ready or else you'll end up wasting alot of time. I wasted a lot of my time because I started off with the visual design and got stuck a lot along the way.

    3. I had a really great time working on this project.There is a need for future reserach like a smart recommendation system or rating system can be designed to improve the experience for the users.