For this project our client wished to improve the sales of the Video on Demand offering. They had noticed not only a steady decline in sales but also a reduction in the number of users adding new content.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study.
Role: User Researcher, UI Designer
Tools/Methods: Sales Data Analysis, Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Heuristic Evaluation, Task Flow Mapping
Duration: 4 weeks
Upfront Data Analysis
To get an understanding of the current state of things I obtained data from a number of sources and began to look for patterns. I wanted to understand the behaviour of the existing site users, and also to get any insight into what else they would be presented with when using competitor services.
Sales Data
This let me see a big picture view of the overall sales volume & value, which allowed me to come up with a few hypotheses to challenge.
Google Analytics (GA)
I used GA to highlight the different navigational routes that people took when seeking & purchasing video content.
Heuristic Evaluation
Using the information from GA, I took the same steps through the UI to map out how those routes were followed. I aimed to surface the successful CTAs within the UI whilst also highlighting those that were not performing.
At this stage the decision was made to focus on encouraging more users to add new content to the site – so the main research focus was surfacing the reasons why the number of uploads had dropped.
User Interviews
The analysis of sales data highlighted a number of different types of users creating & selling content.
A number of these users were contacted and participated in an interview about their usage of the site, how that had changed over the years and various other questions relating to uploading and selling content.
I definitely got more insight than I’d expected, with a lot of users mentioning various other ‘issues’ they had experienced within the site.
I managed to surface multiple other areas that could benefit from improvement – and which may also work towards improving content sales:
• UI – although well established within their niche, the site aesthetic was very dated and off-putting for users
• Advertising – the on-site advertising approach was competitive, but the options were very limitedMinimum
• Pricing model – proved to be too restrictive
I also managed to get an idea of who the users saw as being the sites competitors – who else they used to provide the same kind of offering.
Competitive Analysis
With a list of competitors generated from the users I spoke with, I carried out the same kind of heuristic analysis as had been undertaken on the client site.
This proved to be of less interest to the client, who wished to focus on improving the backend services. As a result of the user interviews, the client decided that they could amend their pricing model alongside making some platform upgrades to allow their users better control over the pricing of their content.
The analysis that I had carried out did show a significant difference in the quality of the UX/UI being offered by other platforms.
I highlighted this as an area for them to consider improving in future iterations as it was an area that their existing users also mentioned during various interviews.
Non-direct competitors were also analysed to demonstrate further opportunity for UX/UI improvements.
Task Flow
Progressing with the client’s intent to improve the uploading facility, I mapped out the user flow to cover each of the different stages of the process.
This was to ensure that the development was considerate of the existing approach/steps.
