Leading Content Discovery & Search
Building and mentoring a team
Senior Product designer (Team lead)
Charter: Discovery
Pods: Browse, Search
with
Sharad Singh: Senior Product Designer
Somanshu: Associate Product Designer
Charvi Mathur: Associate Product Designer
Kunal Verma: Intern design team
Problem:
Discovery was the core of the OTT experience, handled everything from the homepage to getting users to watch a piece of content.
Company POV
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The charter wasn’t performing as intended with only 1 or 2 feature launches every quarter - - The general consensus was that the experience of the app was not at par with our competitors and design initiatives were not being proposed
Design team POV
As a first step, during the transition from acquisition to discovery I had a word with the existing designer who worked on the charter to understand the realties of why such a situation existed. he elaborated how
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Lack of planning and foresight, most of the features initiated were started adhoc in the middle of the quarter and as the roadmap was decided by product and business
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Lack of bandwidth as a solo designer there was only so much he was able to deploy
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Limited say in feature prioritisation, When the designer had an insight or an idea their pov wasn’t prioritised
A failure in the past had impacted the charter immensely, where the consumption screen was redesigned and a dip in the viewer to user ratio had been negatively impacted redacting the flow within 24hrs.
Metrics the charter tracked closely was
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Viewer to user ratio (VTUR)
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Search Click through rate (Search CTR)
Downstream impact discovery was on engagement measures by
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Total session time
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Watch time per user
Impact
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Launched an industry first Ai powered search
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Mentored 4 new designers in the company
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Championed use of research insights in projects
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Created a new prioritisation tool that improved charter productivity and was extended to other charters to be used
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Improved the Search CTR from 79% to 81%
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Team won second place in an internal company Hackathon
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Team launched an experiment which improved VTUR in a control group by 13%
Design Operations
The new team gave us a chance at looking at the charter with fresh eyes. We had an advantage of a larger team but that could soon become a liability if we had been burdened with work. as the associated were fresh graduates and needed training on processes and design tools. I decided to start onboarding the team early and get the associates ready before being introduced to the charter. The usual onboarding process involved auditing the app, but I chose to onboard my team differently, I had them
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Map out the flows on the app after a quick session on how journey mapping is done. This helped them learn how to create a journey map as well as familiarise themselves with the parts of the flow.
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Recreate the home page pixel to pixel using the design system, so they could learnt how to use figma, as well as go familiar to the components they will be using the most. Doing this as onboarding also allowed them to approach these steps in an iterative manner as well as had the advantage of doing so without downstream dependency.
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Choose a problem area they found in the experience and to create a solution, we had set a timeline for a week for this, we met every two days for progress updates and the final presentation was done in front of the entire design team and all their peers. the objective was for them to feel a sense of ownership for their work and to create visibility for them amongst a sea of 56 designers.
Planning and prioritisation
As we got introduced to the larger team, I asked for asked for clarity on the quarterly plan. Though the quarters plan came in late at the end of the first month, I decided to accommodate the tardiness as we were getting acquainted to the charter and its ways of working. I used our newness to request a walkthrough of the Quarterly plan and clarified the priorities of the same. I followed up the meeting with a new format that clarified the prioritisation of work and also clarified which designers would be working on which projects this created accountability on both ends, and transparency in understanding design bandwidth. In later times I faces resistance when I asked for a quarterly plan, or asked for clarity on priority of a task or the success metrics associated with it. at which time I chose to escalate the concerned personnel who were not responsive or evasive in order to get this process standardised. This brought in immense clarity on what BAU tasks existed for us in the quarter and delivery timelines for the same. It allowed the team to work on design initiatives and plan their vacation days without hampering work.
Research and Design
There wasn’t much importance being attributed to a designer opinion in meetings or on projects. The quickest way for us to change that was to move from opinion based language to research backed findings. we had a plethora of in depth user research the team had accumulated over time. asking the designers to cite it wasn’t useful as facts were misquoted and sometimes designers wouldn’t have read the relevant reports themselves. I worked with the research team to conduct walkthrough session of their findings so the team could absorb the information at once rather than reaching out to the researchers for each project We did this walkthrough over 2 weeks. During the presentation it was clear that the documents wren’t self explanatory and were hard to read. I decided to redesign the relevant research documents to include illustrations and make the presentations re-useable so that relevant insights could be copied into other presentations, thus making it easier for designers to include research in their presentations, and ensuring the insights are transferred accurately.
Design Initiatives The increased man power and clarity in timelines allowed us to proactively design various parts of the user journey, giving us a chance to do more than BAU tasks on the roadmap. allowing us to visualise a new experience across the user journey, my team delivered a total of 23 design initiatives.
We worked on
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Thumbnail standardisation: Kunal Verma
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Tags: Kunal Verma
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Top10: Sharad Singh
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More page: Sharad Singh
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Intermediate screen: Sharad Singh
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Preference capture: Somanshu
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For you: Sharad Singh, Charvi Mathur
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Search: Somanshu, Pranav
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Delight: Charvi Mathur
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Consumption page: Charvi Mathur, Pranav Rao
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Retention hook: Kunal Verma, Pranav Rao
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My channel: Pranav Rao
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Apple widgets: Hari
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Idle screen savers: Somanshu
Not all of them got to a stage of development but the rigor of presenting these ideas got us a seat at the table where, design vision was valued. And while most of the ideas remained on figma, they inspired and influenced future porjects, and a impressions of the designs could be seen in future projects.