Video Streaming

5 min readDec 22, 2020

Problem Statement

Whether you want to watch videos from across the world, news, recaps, TV shows, Tutorials or funny videos, you are guaranteed to find something you like in many streaming videos.

Design a video streaming solution which also acts like an aggregator of various streaming solutions and aids in viewing and managing video content.

Learn about the Audience and Identify the User’s needs

User Research

Online Video streaming Sources

Below are the most popular streaming websites where you can find different type of engaging content:

Surveys and User Interview

Nowadays, streaming video providers must give their users a pleasant viewing experience in addition to provide the content they desire. We can evidently see the impact in the deduction of cable operators setup boxes and the inconvenience due to their bulky and unhandy UI being one of the reason. Their non appealing UI also impacts the usability.

Ques1: How do streaming video apps keep user’s engaged?

Ques 2: How user’s consume video content?

Ques 3: Merits of top apps in market?

Quest 4: Pain Points ?

Understand The User and Business goals ( Get insights to better define the problem)

Assumption / possible scenarios 1: Quite often the user is not looking for new content. Rather the goal is to continue watching what you already know . Watching TV is very much about habit and Routine. In some cases, these routines are developed over a long period of time, and can have different “Scenarios”
For Example: You might watch the news every day at 5 PM, you might watch the Tennis every tournament, you might watch the new season of “The Crown” in November every year.

Assumption / possible scenarios 2: User can have multiple choices to watch at different moods at different time. So here feature like “Continue watch” Search and “Watch later” like features are something that make sense and ease to the users. These are the feature which provides user an easy way to pick up where they left and which also make easy to change device. Example from TV to smartphone to Tablet.

Assumption / possible scenarios 3: It’s important to allow users to explore within specific genres and Interest. People pick things to watch because of what interest them.
Subgenres should be considered important in-order to stay more specific and relevant to the user’s needs or demands.

Assumption / possible scenarios 4: It is important to enable users to stay Up-to-date with new things coming up or trending among large amount of users that they might be interested to watch.
So, Keeping that in mind Feature like “New releases”, “Recently added”, “Mostly viewed”, “Highest rated” becomes a way for the user to explore new content within the available ocean of content. These feature can also attract user in many ways like.
“What can a user watch now, that he/she couldn’t watch last month?”
What you are getting under certain Package or money that’s new/Highest rated.

Assumption / possible scenarios 5: Some features are love/hate:-
Certain functionality tend to evoke strong feelings in people either love or hate. In my Research, I found these to be “most popular” because you watched X, watch it again and featured content.

Assumption / possible scenarios 6: The amount of TV/Streaming content out there is so huge that a major pain point is simply navigating through it, remembering things and re-finding stuff.

Assumption / possible scenarios 7: For Series, the pain of finding, evaluating and choosing content is smaller than for movies.

Assumption / possible scenarios 8: Cricket match, IPL, Some big event.

COMPARISON

Nowadays, streaming video providers must give their users a pleasant viewing experience in addition to carrying the content they desire. We can see this effect in deduction of cable companies set up boxes and their inconvenience, bulky and unhandy UI. Their poor UI also impact the usability.

Factors that Impact on reaching various no of users of users of diverse culture worldwide

Live streaming: For a short time youtube was the only source of video streaming game in town.
There are several designs, best practices currently used by the 3 big streaming video apps.

Content is the Key: Once the user has chosen their shows, the UI recedes back as much as possible. Don’t get in a way or distract from the actual content or risk losing your viewers attention.

Thumbnail Matters: Content thumbnails are literally the only info users have with which to make or viewing decision, so give them as much as breathing rooms as possible on small screen.

Always Encourage “one more”: Swipe, episodes etc. Presentation of visual tiles keeps users constantly scrolling to see the next movies or shows in their curated lists.

Streaming video apps all look similar: There is currently lots of rooms for innovation in the design of streaming video apps keeping all problem solving solution and fulfilling user needs.
There is so much video available and the paradox of choices is always overwhelming so there is a huge opportunities to innovate around how that ocean of content can be presented.

HOW USER CONSUME VIDEO CONTENT

Crucially finding and watching content is only to a lesser degree about finding new content and larger degree about watching the shows, movies and programs a user already knows about which makes functionality such as “search”, “continue watching” and “my list” equally important than recommendations.