BlobFisk.com

Wireframe of the new programme video page (Click to enlarge)

I’ve been really enjoying the last couple of months at work! I enjoying working in general, but lately I’ve been engrossed in a really meaty and fun project – sculpting the user experience of our new video proposition, which I mentioned in my previous post, The Problem with Online Video.

I talked about the issue we had with pop-up players not sitting well with our advertising policies. We’ve refined the solution a little more to make it more usable. Now, users will be able to launch the pop-out directly from the video list. We can’t get around the fact that the user needs to make that decision before watching, but it’s a click less to get to playing video now.

With the introduction of archive video, rather than just the last 30 days catch-up video, we have been working hard on the findability of video.

There are a number of scenarios of use, the primary one being catch-up, watching the episode of Shameless that you missed last night. But we need to cater for people who want to watch old shows, or just want to be entertained for a while. Currently we use a drop down list of the programmes that you can watch online. Now I’m not a big fan of drop down lists and try to limit their use to lists of known options (like a list of months or countries). We can get away with it at the moment as it’s a limited list, however once archive video is introduced this list will be completely out of the question.

So, we’re planning to introduce a Video Finder widget, which works like predictive search. As a user types a programme name we dynamically show a list of results. This is going to be very quick and reacts to the first letter type. It only shows programmes that have video content, which allows users to very quickly get to the programme that they want to watch.

Below is the interaction state diagram for the search widget. This widget lives on the video landing page, which sits with the mechanisms for finding programmes to catch-up on (date based) and the methods for getting suggestions of shows to watch. This is for people who just want to be entertained, we have a high impact area at the top which suggests shows you may like to watch, and some categories.

Interaction States for the Video Finder widget (Click to Enlarge)

Wireframe of the Video Landing Page (Click to Enlarge)

To further inform users as to what kind of content they can expect to find in a category we give an example of a programme from that category. This mechanism further informs the user as to what kind of content they can expect to find in a category. There is also an A – Z widget, which takes the user to the programme listing page for that letter (for example: Programmes beginning with “W”).

I’m really excited about this project. The high fidelity designs look fantastic and I can’t wait for it to go live (end of June is the current timeframe we’re looking at). As always, any and all feedback is appreciated. If you’d like to take a look at the wireframes, I’m happy to share them in return for some honest feedback!