Fast-tracking new apps to drive subscriber growth

Revenue growth through channel optimisation is a fundamental requirement for VOD businesses, and our experience in this area is unparalleled. Having built and then continuously developed ITV Hub on iOS and Android over the last 9 years, we could meet all of UKTV’s challenges and be their ideal partner.

UKTV needed to deliver more performant and personalised UKTV Play apps on the Roku and NowTV platforms in order to attract new subscribers. Whilst there were interesting technical challenges to overcome, we began by looking for the all-important sweetspot: the point at which human needs meet business demand. We would focus our efforts here in personalised UX and app efficiencies before over-delivering and introducing some brand new app features.

For UKTV, the sweetspot consisted of: exceeding customer expectations with the fastest possible download speed (wherever and on whatever device they may be), careful adjustments to the UX for an optimal TV-interaction experience, and producing a clean and lean codebase. This codebase is the bedrock of easy maintainability and efficient updates as UKTV continues to grow its offering over time.

Securing growth by eliminating subscription barriers

Account registration is a key metric for a VOD business, but is often a key moment for drop-off in the customer journey. A main area of focus in our UX work was therefore the onboarding (new user set-up) process and ease of sign-up. Alongside adjustments to navigation, we paid particular attention to the challenges of interacting through remote controls, guidance and feedback to users, and the large, landscape real estate of TV apps.

Our preferred Agile Scrum method of working allowed us to rapidly deliver incremental releases whilst continuing to improve other aspects of the platform in the background. Delivering in increments reduces risk because each release is smaller, less complex and easy to test, and it also means getting improvements or new features into users’ hands faster. Not only were we able to deliver continuous value for UKTV and their audiences, we also used live usage analytics - science - rather than opinion to make evidence-based UX decisions and further optimise the app.

A personalised, performant app that delivers user and business value

Drawing on our expertise in VOD, we worked with the UKTV team to add new content organisation features: 'Categories' and 'Subcategories'. Together with our improvements to the onboarding and sign-up process content, content discovery and navigation, UKTV now offers a more personalised experience with business-critical 'Recommended Content' - This personalisation is expected by users and was vital for UKTV because it boosts discovery of new content, keeping viewers using the app for longer, increasing MAU’s and all important viewing hours.

In addition to refactoring the codebase and building new features, we helped to update the APIs and how the app uses them, achieving our goal of speeding up page loads and downloads - the user’s own connection now being the only limiting factor.

With our technical and UX goals achieved and delivered at lightspeed, these two new iterations of UKTV really did deliver the sweetspot: business growth and customer satisfaction.