Prime Video Redesign

Role

  • One of close to 50 designers, researchers, and product owners working on redesigning the entire experience from the ground up

  • Lead on Prime Video Store experience redesign

Situation

Prime Video is different from other services like Netflix and Hulu, which include all content under a single subscription. In case of Prime Video, in addition to content included in your Prime membership, the service offers an immense catalog of PAID Video on Demand content. This led to the following customer problems:

  • Entitlement confusion

    Customers are confused by what content is included in Prime, and why most content requires additional payment.

  • Offer clarity

    Discovery is harder when, in addition to searching for something to watch, customers must also deal with offer confusion (e.g., rent vs. buy vs. subscribe vs. free with ads).

  • Relevance and propensity

    Customers don’t know what is most relevant to them. A balance of personalization and merchandising is needed to create a fun new way to shop top new content.

  • Visual presentation quality

    The repetitive standard carousel type fails to differentiate top tier from lower tier content, making it easy for customers to miss titles they would otherwise love to watch. 

Figure 1: Before the update. Carousels mixed free and paid content, failed to demonstrate priority, and overwhelmed our customers.

Tasks

Within the larger scope, I led a 3-person team focused on the Prime Video Store. Our tasks were to:

  • Provide customers with a general sense for what they can find in the Store. E.g., “What are Channels, ad-supported content, et cetera.”

  • Help customers discover new, personalized and popular titles to rent, buy or subscribe to.

  • Help customers easily differentiate paid content from free (in and out of the Store)

  • Present a balanced view of personalized and merchandised content that makes shopping fun and engaging.

Actions

Design Principles were established to guide the team’s decision-making

  • A simpler, more intuitive information architecture

  • Useful, distinctive navigational nodes

  • Limited paid content in areas our customers expect to be “free”’

  • When we do display un-entitled content, differentiate it clearly

  • Don’t overwhelm customers with too many options

  • Enable rich display patterns with new content containers

  • Reduce the amount of content options a customer can see in a single view

Defined Epics and User Stories to focus the design

Detailed stories were written out around four problem-driven Epics:

  • Offer clarity

  • Discovery

  • Entitlement

  • Relevance

Figure 2: Sample of Offer Clarity user stories

Dove deep into IA

In this example, I focused on the problem of Channel [Subscription] discovery. I explored how customers could seamlessly traverse Channel content throughout the Prime Video experience. Starting with quick low-fidelity schema, to final mid-fidelity definition.

To demonstrate how the new navigation and flow benefit our customers, I compared the IA of the current products to the proposed flow.

Figure 3: Lo-fi look at Channel Discovery

Figure 4: Shows inconsistencies in Channel discovery IA between first and third-party device applications.

Figure 5: Shows proposed IA that unifies the Channel discovery experience across all platforms, taking advantage of new container designs and updated global navigation.

Wireframing flows and ingress points

Diving deeper into interaction and information design, I explored multiple ways our customers would discover available Channel subscriptions and content.

Figure 6: Flow showing a discovery path from home to channel subscription.

Figure 7: Shows possible ingress points and container designs comprising the Channel discovery and exploration experience.

Visual design

The team responsible for the visual design of the application used these mid-fidelity wireframes to arrive at the final design. Along with other indicators, the Store-related screens and sections were presented with a golden glow, to differentiate them from the free content.

Figure 8-12: High Fidelity Design Explorations

Results

I left Prime Video 6 months into the project and was excited to see the new experience ship about a year later (July 2020), successfully addressing most of the customer problems we set out to solve.

  • Entitlement confusion

    Paid content is clearly differentiated through a combination of methods and is easily recognizable.

  • Offer clarity

    The differentiation of offer types are reinforced by clear labeling, badging, and visual formatting.

  • Relevance and propensity

    Relevance is reinforced through information and visual design, behind the scenes logic, and reduction of options on the screen.

  • Visual presentation quality

    The repetitive standard carousels were replaced by a variety of container types that promote differentiation of top tier from lower tier content, making it easy for customers to find titles they will love. Intentional visual differentiation of paid content, makes it easy for customers to focus on the content they want to interact with.