DIRECTV Everywhere

Role: Co-Lead Product Designer (2 total)
Duration: 2 months (September - October 2018)

DIRECTV is our traditional satellite customer base, with a legacy product called "DIRECTV TV Everywhere" that serves those customers on mobile and web platforms, separate from our newer DIRECT NOW (OTT Streaming) product.

On the Product roadmap was to bridge the two platforms and sunset the legacy apps. The problem was that they lived on two different back-end services, and the legacy product's only DVR option was on the set top box itself in their home.

How might we provide a seamless experience porting over the features from DIRECTV Everywhere to DIRECTV NOW, when the features don't quite map out one to one?

Feature Audit

We worked with Product Owners (4 total, each leading a specific feature set) taking a look across our supported platforms to see if a 1:1 feature parity was possible. We had daily working sessions with Product to review documentation, current production features, and backlog items. We started with Mobile, and the following are examples of the layouts, which were similar across Tablet and Web. One of the prominent features was the large toggle at the top, which indicates what mode the user is in, Watch on Device is a streaming mode, and Browse for TV is recording mode.

Feature Grooming

From what we gathered in our audits, Product created an exhaustive list of features that should be considered in this port-over. At the time, the Product team were in Dallas, so this interaction was mainly remote, with final artifacts being Word documents and email.

While the higher level planning and engagements were happening, we also started to discuss with our development teams and Product teams for our OTT products to see if the back-end systems and data can be ported, and what levels of effort would be needed per listed feature.

We also reached out to our data & analytics teams to see what kind of numbers we could get from our legacy apps. Streaming dominates. ~90% of the active base are streamers. Under 10% of users are record-only users. We looked at paths and trends, and this gave a mismatch on user behavior and what the legacy app was trying to do - give equal weight on streaming with recording.

Excerpt from an Initial feature list from our Product team

Product Direction

Throughout the process, myself and one other Product Designer had frequent check ins with our Design Directors, to make sure we were heading in the right direction. We used our data findings to help steer the conversation and planning to be more of a Streaming first approach, which aligned well with our newer OTT product strategy. We presented our strategy through several meetings with different audiences, via Keynote slides, in which Product agreed and adjusted the feature roadmap to always ladder back to the following principles:

Streaming is the primary action
Default views are focused on streaming content
Recording is still an important feature, but display it in the correct context

Outcomes