In order to _____(Vision) our product will solve _____ (Target Audience) problem of _____(User problem) by giving them _____(Strategy) . We will know when our product works when we see ____ (Goal).

In August of 2015, we began a project I dubbed the “Watch App Innovation Initiative”. Part “team bonding”, part “problem solving” and part “outlet for creative expression”, this served as our first “informal” steps towards rethinking our TV everywhere apps. With one eye on business goals, and the other on user needs, each team member - from design, to dev to QA - was tasked with exploring one idea which could potentially elevate our product to the next level. Deliverables could be in any form, as long as the owner could follow these instructions:

"When thinking in products, you should be able to answer the following questions: What problem do we solve? (User problem). For whom are we doing this? (Target audience). Why are we doing this? (Vision). How are we doing this (Strategy) and what do we want to achieve? (Goals). Only then it makes sense to think about what exactly we are doing (Features). Apply the answers to these questions, to the "blanks" above, to form your hypothesis."

I had several business goals that I wanted to tackle in my exploration, in particular, to increase video views (video starts) and engagement (minutes per user), to improve the overall user experience, and to be a leader in design & technology for TV everywhere. Equally as important, I aimed to address several user needs which we’d identified as opportunities, such as improving the apps search indexing capabilities, creating a more robust search interface, improving the users ability to find specific episodes, and to “decide to watch”.

I had flagged a few guiding principles to myself, such as “Navigation systems are a key way to help guide users towards desirable goals.” and “We should elevate our thinking of navigation and really embrace the influence it has on the experience of using the product we create. It should be among the most critically considered and refined elements in the design.” These tenants seemed to resonate with some of the issues I wanted to design for, and worked in tandem with my desire to strive for simplicity. Here’s what my filled out hypothesis statement looked like:

In order to "get the user to what he/she wants", our product will solve "the dedicated fans" problem of "getting to the specific show they are interested in quickly & easily" by giving them "voice search capability". We will know when our product works when we see "users choose this method of navigation above all others".

I had several design ideas I wanted to stitch together, and knew that skecthes and flat comps were not going to do the idea justice. For my example, motion would be the key.

“Animation leverages an overlooked dimension — time! An invisible fabric which stitches space together. It seems crazy to me that more people don’t think about interfaces with respect to the dimension of time. Motion can provide so much information!”

And thus, my first stab at inspiriing my team and stakeholders at large was born. Sketches were done on iPad using the Paper app, comps were done in Sketch, and the demo was assembled in Adobe After Effects.