CIRRUS was designed as an innovative 2nd screen companion to pair with an OTT experience. The core focus of the design was developing a contextual remote with a responsive layout based on two primary factors; Orientation of the phone and where it
was in-home or out-of-home.
I served UX/UI lead as part of a project research team and worked directly with developers to build and test prototypes.
The Challenge
Our then CTO approached my team to build a new OTT experience took advantage of the OTT platform development to get rid of some of our repetitive elements and add a few.
• The phone is the remote control with voice commands and gesture as the majority of the new functionality.
• Phone orientation defines the users intent; Portrait is for browsing, Landscape is for viewing on your device.
• Voice would be a significant feature as well as user location.
Defining the Key Pain Points
The DIRECTV mobile app is full of repetitive and hidden features and has become bloated over the years.
• The app would show users in-home options grayed out while the user was out-of-home, making it difficult to decipher what a user could watch.
• Users did not know many features existed in the app. The average user was not aware of the ability to use voice commands.
Execution: Design
This goal, in part, was to present a suggested way to declutter the actual DIRECTV app and make features easier for users to access. With that in mind, the presentation focused on presenting it as such.
Wireframes vs Final Comps
Key features we focused on
• Out-of-home only sees available options away from home.
• Portrait mode focuses on television viewing while Landscape focuses on phone viewing.
• Portrait mode focuses on television viewing while Landscape focuses on phone viewing.
• Fast access to user goals.
Quick menu items grant users faster access to their desired action.
Execution: Prototyping
During this project, we prototyped in several different formats due to the nature of having this be more of an internal presentation as much as technical one. We used Invision to check basic functionality and mapping. We also prototyped animations to present ideas of what we imagined the transitions to function. The final step was to build the actual app.
Rotating the phone from landscape to portrait broadcasts the content to the television while switching it from portrait to landscape pulls the content to the phone
Outcome and Takeaways
This project was great opportunity to work with our CTO, as well as put together some fun ideas for a potential product.
In practice, relying on the phone orientation for intent is problematic because of the high number of unintentional rotations we do with our phones. The idea that we could use other non-traditional gestures to flick content to the tv and pull content away is still worth researching.
