Adding a feature to Disney+
For this assignment, I was asked to add a feature to a well-known native mobile app. In this article, I will guide you through my design thinking process and present a hi-fi prototype of Disney+ on iOS.
About Disney+
Disney+ is the streaming home of Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, and more. It was launched in late 2019 and has 87.6 million subscribers worldwide. Subscribers can access content on smart TVs, browsers, Android and iOS devices. I’ll focus my study on the iOS mobile app which is rated 4.8 stars on the App Store.
Research
The App Store was the starting point of my project: Disney+ is rated 4.8 stars and most users are quite happy with the streaming platform. However, by digging into the reviews I found out that the “Continue watching” feature had some issues: several users mentioned it was not easy to access their “Continue watching” lists and it was annoying that they could not stop watching shows they had no intention to keep watching.
Based on this finding, I invited 5 Disney+ users for a usability test followed by an interview.
“As user of Disney+, I want to have autonomy to manage my personalised content lists”
Ideation
I brainstormed solutions to improve the “Continue watching” feature to meet users’ needs. Since most users are quite happy with the Disney+ app, I had no intention of completely changing it. For that reason, I decided to reuse the same structure of the already existing “Downloads” list.
I invited five Disney+ users for a round of testing using a simple paper prototype. After gathering feedback and iterating, I came up with a few ideas on how to easily allow users to personalize their watchlist. It was important for this feature to be accessible on the navigation bar.
High Fidelity Prototype
On the search page, a new section called “My Collections” was added. This new section has three new tiles: “Continue Watching”, “Watch Again” and “Watchlist”. By accessing the personalized lists via tiles, users can see and edit their entire lists of shows. On the prototype, you can check how the “Continue Watching” list would work.
Testing
Usability tests showed that there is still room for improvement. Here are some insights I gathered:
users expect to see the personalized lists on their profile section as well
a button “stop watching” on the show page could give even more autonomy to the user
Conclusion
It’s important to give users autonomy over their personalized content. In this case, it will prevent users from having a long overwhelming “Continue watching” list that does not reflect their willingness to continue watching.
I really enjoyed working on this project because it was a challenge to redesign an app that is rated almost 5 stars. I also had to dive into Figma and learn how to work on prototyping and keep it as close as possible to the actual Disney+ app, by the way, I used the kids' account layout on my design.