Channel 4
Channel 4 Youview player and on demand portal
The Challenge
How do you build a brand new way to consume channel 4 content on an untested platform with multiple partners, made up of the major UK television networks? And just to make it really fun, you have to make it in all in Adobe Flashlite (!)
My Role
Experience Director / project lead for ustwo™.
Project Length
One and a half years
Overview
Keeping a team aligned across multiple stakeholders, within numerous disciplines and plenty of time for distractions was a challenge, to say the least!
As the Experience Director, it was my job to ensure that we aligned both with Channel 4 and internally around requirements, features and audience. This often meant iteration on various elements of the UI and experience, live prototyping (using keynote or flash – these were the pre-invision days!) to allow people to explore solutions or highlight issues.
A key concept video produced near the beginning of the project.
Want to dive a bit deeper?
Are we there yet?
Managing a budget of over £2 million to ensure delivery of the platform with both internal and external development partners was key – ensuring that product teams could be ramped up/ ramped down quickly dependant on sprint requirements was feasible. Also, over a project of this length consistency was provided by creating adequate knowledge share to allow different team members in various disciplines to rotate in and out to avoid burnout.
That ‘sit back’ experience.
Creating a sit-back experience that aligned with the underlying Youview Platform design system – but yet was uniquely channel 4 was vital. Inspiration was taken from the Sony PS3 X-bar navigation, where the content focus stays in a static position, and the content moves vertically and horizontally to select a program.
User testing played a crucial part in ensuring that the solution worked for a broad cross-section of the public. From tech heads to people that were not computer literate, we tested at major milestones with an external testing company to ensure that it was done in context and that we were not excluding people.
What did it achieve?
Channel 4od player went live in 2012 with Youview’s launch and instantly saw success at a time when streaming digital content into peoples homes was just going mainstream. Now viewed by millions of people nationwide, since launch the platform has built detailed data-based audience profiles – delivering more contextually relevant content and growing advertising revenue year on year by an average of +14% (up to 2018).
“All 4 enjoyed record-breaking success in October attracting the biggest number of monthly views ever* and, following the launch of its latest individually personalised homepage, is experiencing robust year-on-year viewing growth of +14% year-to-date with a total of 557 million views. The trend to watch on-demand on TV sets continues to soar with views up +24% compared to last year.”
Although the Adobe Flash platform has been replaced with HTML technologies, the design has only been updated to bring it in-line with the brand as it evolved over the years. Creating an experience that helped pioneer the way people consumed ‘sit back’ content in a shared environment was a huge challenge, and I will always be proud of the result our team delivered at a pioneering time.