UX | Research
Redefining Sky TV
Empowering customers to create their perfect Sky Stream package
Sky | 24 Weeks
Overview
Sky Stream, the newest way to watch Sky TV, launched in late 2022 and would ultimately see Sky begin to move away from the traditional satellite TV setup. Sky wanted to mark its release with a new discovery and purchase journey. Found on Sky.com, the experience would allow users to learn about content and the product itself, build their perfect TV package and manage their contracts, as well as the way they watched their content.
The Brief
To create a frictionless customer experience, that connects Sky customers to the things they love. While Sky content would be at the heart of the Sky Stream sales journey, customers would be able to clearly understand what Sky Stream is, its benefits and what makes it different to other Sky TV products.
My Role
I led the UX on the project, while I was responsible for planning and facilitating a series of co-creation research sessions and workshops. Working closely with the creative lead, I collaborated with other UX and visual designers, as well as UX writers throughout to create an end-to-end discovery and purchase experience.
Discovery
Making sense of a tricky, open-ended brief that covered the full end-to-end experience
With a brief that covered discovery, buy and subscription management, I dedicated time to delve further into it and deconstruct the material. In doing so, I was able to identify key themes, further questions and how might we’s, which would be carried through to the initial ideation phase. Interrogating the brief also included work around persona considerations, collating learnings from other Sky projects and understanding how other TV streaming services are communicating and selling their products.
Taking the time to dig into the brief set the initial stage of the project up, uncovering key themes and areas of interest, while it ensured we were asking the right questions.
Key Themes & Areas of Interest
👤 Users
Appeal to and build trust with prospects and existing customers
🧠 Product Knowledge
Communicate all necessary and relevant information throughout, including features and benefits
🕵🏻♀️ Research
Portray Sky as offering the best streaming service for the best price
Use reviews to guide and inform prospects
🤝 Support
Communicate important info, product roles and contract details upfront
Provide support to reduce online to offline drop-off
🤓 Comparison
Compare and communicate the role of Sky products with cross-brand comparison
Offer an effective comparison to guide customers
🧭 Journey
Seamlessly incorporate content, hardware and up/cross-selling
Leverage ecommerce best practice
🔀 Cross-Selling
Introduce seamless, ‘expected’ cross/upsell
Reduce potential friction for different customers
Cross-sell Glass to prospects
📺 Content
Prioritise content and reassure customers Sky offer the best, most suitable hardware
⭐️ Brand
Become the front runner in the world of entertainment
Get back to basics with who Sky are and their USPs
The key themes and areas of interest provided clear discussion points for the initial workshops.
Working with the creative lead and creative director, we facilitated a client workshop that would kick the project off with customer focused thinking at the forefront of everything. Understanding the value proposition and Stream’s USPs was seen as a key area early on with many questions asked on what made Sky Stream a market leader. Workshop outputs, including what customers would look for and experience maps were used to generate exploratory user flows and pen portraits, which were later validated with moderated testing.
Having a clear understanding on how the business saw Sky Stream in comparison to their other TV services and how it sat within their product ecosystem helped us to understand the target audience for the service and how the proposition could be integrated into the website.
Workshop outputs
🧠
A view on everyone’s assumptions and mental model
💡
A clear understanding of the key differences and decisions behind buying Sky Stream, Glass and Q
👩
Exploratory user flows and
pen portraits
On the back of the initial discovery work, there was a shared perception between ourselves and Sky that Stream could start to evolve Sky.com and create a more integrated, immersive end-to-end experience for prospective customers. With this in mind, discovery would be a prominent part of the product journey.
Ideate & Define
Keen to start trying to wrap our heads around how the Stream journey might look, I took the exploratory flows I produced on the back of the first workshop, into a series of sessions with POs and engineers. Each flow was discussed in detail, while the effort, impact and feasibility was identified. We were left with 2 flows. An option that tweaked the existing Sky Glass journey to accommodate Stream and a north star option that would flip Sky.com on its head and change the way customers shopped across the entire Sky ecosystem.
I offered an assumption on how the user flows ranked against one another from a design, development and business perspective. Having gone through each of the flows in detail, pros and cons were discussed, while the flows were plotted on an impact vs effort matrix alongside key stakeholders and the dev team to gauge what would be realistic and feasible moving forward.
User flow 2, which was an adaptation of the existing Sky Glass purchase journey and user flow 8, which was a ‘nuclear option’ due to its blended build as your browse approach, were carried through for further exploration.
At this point, we parked the flows and started thinking about our vision for the experience, as well as more granular areas, such as page structure and interactions. We planned and ran another workshop with the client, which was based on a number of key ideas from the business, including leading with content over hardware and flexible contracts. The group explored the worst possible experience and used the pen portraits to build their own pages, while Crazy 8’s was used to explore components on a more granular level.
A selection of screenshots showcasing the different ideation activities I facilitated.
Validating the perceived mental model through co-creation with existing and prospective Sky TV customers
Having leant on assumptions and previous learnings up until this point, I planned and facilitated a series of co-creation sessions with prospective and existing Sky TV customers. In doing so, I was able to validate our work and uncover patterns in the customer’s mental model. This provided some fantastic insights that were used to evolve the exploratory flows that I had pieced together previously.
12 x 1 hour face-to-face interviews
Understanding a recent
experience
Discussing a recent or memorable online purchase experience to help us to understand what they like and dislike when buying something online.
Communicating Sky Stream and it’s features
Uncovering the way participants think about TV, the terminology they use to describe streaming services and what they associate with the Sky brand.
What matters to people and where reasons to buy should be placed
Ranking Sky Stream’s ‘reasons to buy’ based on what was most relevant and important to participants with rankings validated via unmoderated testing later in the project.
How will users learn about Sky Stream and build their package
Asking users to map out their ideal experience using a number of specified steps/features to understand the expected approach and hierarchy of content.
Facilitating co-creation sessions with existing and prospective customers uncovered lots of rich insights covering expectations of Sky Stream, previous experience with Sky and what really mattered when purchasing a Sky service.
What did co-creation tell us?
Provided validation on the key discussions with the business around whether Stream would follow a content or technology first narrative.
Price and content are the two most important factors
Participants didn’t give much thought to the technology they’d watch Sky TV on. It was a simple case of, I’ll buy Sky TV and I'd expect to watch it via Sky Stream.
Sky Stream is seen as the default way to watch Sky TV
Revealed significant insight into how and where Sky Glass could be communicated and helped steer conversations with the business who saw the upsell as their top priority.
Sky Glass is a subtle or separate buying decision
On the back of the initial discovery work, there was a shared perception between ourselves and Sky that Stream could start to evolve Sky.com and create a more integrated, immersive end-to-end experience for prospective customers. With this in mind, discovery was ever present throughout the main bulk of the project.
Key Challenges
Significant decisions late in the day
After it had been agreed that flexible contracts would be handled in the post purchase journey, we were told that the capability had already been built and so it was consequently briefed in as a major requirement. Consequently, the creative lead and I were given one day to ideate against several scenarios and demoed three concepts back to the client the following day. On the back of further collaboration with the business and multiple rounds of user testing, the experience launched with an elegant solution that ensured users could select their preferred contract types, simultaneously without too much friction.
Creating a strong, cohesive narrative
After crafting a narrative based on the co-creation findings, the dev team felt it was too close to the previously discussed north star. Collaborating with the creative lead and the client, we realigned the business goals with the key themes from co-creation. All changes continued to be tested frequently, which also revealed further insights into how USPs told the story. Although this part of the project was challenging, moving away from the initial narrative resulted in a clearer story being told during the discovery experience and a more streamlined, focused purchase journey.
Upselling Sky Glass
Although we were selling Sky Stream, the priority from the business was to upsell Sky Glass. in such a way that compromised the user-driven narrative. I worked with the team on a number of approaches, which I put into unmoderated user testing for validation. In order to help bridge the narrative, multiple approaches to design and copy went into further testing. Several iterations later and I was left with a simplified product page that called out key USPs, highlighted reviews and gave users a simple binary choice on whether they wanted to upgrade to Sky Glass.
The Solution
Adopting a content-led approach that integrates flexibility and transparency into every step of the experience
The initial discovery phase of the experience and the TV-specific steps of the buy journey were the focus of the MVP. I worked with the broadband and checkout teams to ensure the respective steps were suitable for the latter parts of the flow.
Leading with Sky’s exclusive content across multiple entry points
Sky are known for their great content rather than their hardware and so this narrative was reflected in the routes into the Stream experience. Deemed as the new way to watch Sky TV, a content focused hero offered up the options to configure a TV package or explore Sky Stream. The addition of a new business driven ‘TV Hub’ page resulted in a reshuffle in the global navigation, which meant technology, including Sky Stream, could be grouped together.
Blending content with hardware to create a clear and exciting narrative
The idea behind Sky Stream was that it would allow customers to watch all the best content in the easiest way possible. With this in mind, the product page followed an insight fuelled narrative that showcased reasons to buy including content, flexibility, ease and app aggregation. Leading with content and ease, the page intended to tell a clear story through visuals and concise information. Previous learnings ensured details, such as pricing, were elevated accordingly and broken down to ensure there were no surprises when entering the buy journey.
Build your TV package, on your terms
Content and flexibility were deemed to be the most important thing to people when purchasing Sky TV. With this in mind, the first step of the buy journey allowed users to build their perfect TV package and select their preferred contract type on premium packs. The likes of Ultra HD and Ad-Skip followed to ensure users were offered all content-related extras in a single step.
Enhance your viewing experience with Whole home
Having added their perfect Sky TV package to their basket, users were given the opportunity to enhance the way they watched Sky throughout their home. While previous iterations included the likes of Glass and Live, the limitations surrounding production infrastructure meant this step launched with a clear focus on Sky’s Whole home capability.
Watch your favourite TV in perfection with Sky Glass
While Sky Stream was seen as the new default way to watch Sky TV, Sky Glass was positioned as the best way to watch it. The final TV-specific step of the buy journey presented users with a condensed product page that provided them with technology-specific USPs on Glass. This interstitial step called out pricing, from an upgrade point of view, and presented users with a simple binary decision to ensure a clear path into the next step of their journey.
Reflection
Having worked with Ford for such a long time, this project presented similar situations but working with a new agency and team, it also exposed me to an array of different approaches and processes. I saw it as a great opportunity to push myself in areas I hadn’t had the chance to in the past. I took it upon myself to facilitate co-creation sessions and client workshops, which provided me with the confidence to take charge of more strategic and research based tasks in future.
Next Steps
Shortly after the UX was completed for the initial Black Friday launch, I stepped away from the Sky account. Further testing was planned on an array of features, while the interstitial Sky Glass step was due to be launched in Q1 2023.
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