Taylor Swift NOW
In 2016, AT&T signed a major, exclusive multi-year, multi-faceted deal featuring performances and content with 10-time GRAMMY® award-winning singer, songwriter, musician and producer Taylor Swift.As part of the agreement, Taylor Swift would create exclusive content for AT&T which it would provide free to its customers.
I served UX/UI lead, working with an Art Director; as part of a project research team; and worked directly with developers to build and test prototypes.
The Challenge
Taylor Swift’s team was very hands on in regards to her brand and wanted approval over every step of the process. Being agile, this wasn't as inconvenient since check-ins are apart of the process but response times took days.
Taylor Swift NOW was the first attempt from AT&T to create a consistent experience across DIRECTV and U-verse platforms. We were given the lead to develop for both platforms which meant we had to familiarize ourselves with the U-verse interaction pattern library.
Users need to be able to find desired content fast and easy.
Defining the Key Pain Points
Taylor Swift has an extensive catalog of material and, unsurprisingly, the most significant pain point was navigating and sorting this content. Traditionally, U-Verse and AT&T use thumbnails and titles to label section. This interaction pattern is very cumbersome when browsing to locate specific content.
Another pain point was deciding where content should likely live. Should a favorite fan video be organized in “My Fans Amazed Me” category or with the related song or could it live in multiple places?
Execution: Design
We chose to focus solely on video content from Taylor Swift’s massive catalog. Adding support for audio files and photos were too out of scope for this experience.
We chose to use carousel navigation, instead of our traditional grid view, to simplify navigation and give users access faster. We wanted users to be able to see the videos options in each carousel without unnecessary clicks-throughs.
Navigation was simple. Left and right browse the carousel titles, while up and down navigated the different carousel sections. Any carousel that has over ten videos had a “View More” button that switched to grid style navigation of that carousel's content. We did this to keep the performance of the app high and to avoid cluttering the screen.
We removed info screen pages to allow the videos to play immediately. Since there were no advanced options, these pages had no purpose.
Execution: Prototyping
The prototype process went into 3 phases:
We used a hybrid of high fidelity comps to showcase the intended look of the app with a wireframe walkthrough of the app.
We used a hybrid of high fidelity comps to showcase the intended look of the app with a wireframe walkthrough of the app.
We created an Invision prototype to work as a living document alongside the wireframes to test for inconsistencies and test for possible scenarios we overlooked. The prototype was also a guide for the developers to validate the navigation behavior.
We created a production-ready prototype on our set-top-box hardware, to begin testing performance and get both user and stakeholder feedback.
Testing
Because of the nature of secrecy around this app, before it’s launching, our testing was done in-house with employees.
As mentioned above, the carousels had a “View More” button. This feature is partly because of performance issues in regards to the amount of thumbnails loading and calls to the server.
The carousel navigation emerged from comments of the category titles not being apparent. The users “wished they could see the content without having to click through the menu.”
Also, thanks to user feedback, we agreed that the info screen was a formality and not needed, so we removed it from the flow altogether.
Outcome
Taylor Swift NOW launched in December 2016, but this experience halted due to technical difficulties on the U-verse platform. We did develop a new framework for U-verse and DIRECTV platforms for future AT&T’s partnerships with artist and sponsors
