Our Solution

The UX design approach essentially focused on 5 key pillars:

One-stop-shop: As a first step, to establish the UX playbook and blueprint for discovery+, we conducted foundational research with target users across India. Our research confirmed that users would prefer an integrated, one-stop-shop approach to consuming non-fiction content. We also gathered user insights regarding content preferences, subscription models, pricing, etc. These research insights established a clear app strategy and laid down a solid foundation for the design effort.

Discoverability: The user research also revealed multiple triggers and variables (such as: time of day, emotion, content length, life stage, brag value, etc.) that impact user’s content viewing preferences & behavior. This led us to completely re-imagine the content categorization for discovery+ and create several innovative content buckets and micro-genres. This not only ensured that overall information architecture of the app matches the target users’ mental model but also enhanced content findability.

Stickiness: Enhancing amount of time spent on the app is key to hitting the engagement goals for any content platform. “Shorts” was an innovation crafted specifically to enhance engagement for the tik-tok generation which is used to binging on bite-sized video content facilitated by infinite scrolling interfaces designed to maintain an uninterrupted flow of dopamine. This mash-up of short format non-fiction content & infinite scrolling with a streaming platform is a one of a kind OTT engagement strategy and UX innovation that truly sets discovery+ apart from other players.

Shareability: We crafted a hyper-simple sharing experience by seamlessly integrating user’s most preferred sharing channel (WhatsApp) into the app interface. This innovation has proven to be a key factor in enhancing content share-ability resulting in increasing organic user acquisitions for discovery+.

Intelligence: We wanted to ensure that the home page and landing pages for core content categories provide users with a comprehensive overview of discovery’s vast content breadth and depth. Circular content toggles at the top of key pages were integrated into the interface for precisely that reason. An added benefit of this approach was that user interaction with these content toggles essentially became an intelligence gathering mechanism that continuously captures content preferences and fuels discovery’s content personalization & recommendation engines.