BET+ - Search Experience

 

The Problem

Enhancing our search experience did not begin as a ticketed request through our normal business channels. I was sitting in on a bi-weekly call where our customer experience team went through user feedback and subscriber retention numbers. One of the pain points mentioned during that call was how users were struggling to find content through search. Users were getting ‘No Results’ for content they knew was available in the site. After taking this feedback and reviewing our search experience, it felt like low-hanging fruit to improve the search flow for our users.

My Goals

To start, I needed to gather information about the current live experience to understand more deeply the user perspective around our search. Based on that feedback, I would then focus design explorations on the features that would provide the biggest impact for our users to improve the search experience.

 

Discovery

User Research

To capture the user perspective around the current search experience I decided to conduct virtual user testing through usertesting.com. I tested the live web experience with 10 participants asking them to complete the following tasks that involved navigating and interacting with the search page:

  1. Starting from the home page, find the show ‘The Family Business’

  2. Starting from the search page, find the movie ‘Miss Juneteenth’

  3. What features do you expect to see on the search page?

  4. What streaming platform has your favorite search experience? Please share your reasoning.

Key Findings

Majority of participants were able to complete the first two tasks in under 2 minutes using the site navigation or scrolling through content pages and found the tasks very easy to complete. When asked what features they expected to see, we received valuable feedback that users were missing content recommendations, filtering options, and specific functions such as autofill and clearing the search bar in our experience. Netflix was the preferred search experience out of our peers, however Hulu, Disney+ and Peacock were mentioned. I would focus on these brands for a competitive analysis.

Based on the feedback from the users, I was able to create two user personas that showcased the main goals of our respondents.

 
 

Competitive Analysis

After concluding user testing, I did a competitive analysis of other search experiences from our peer streaming and cable channels to find consistencies and outliers in these other experience that could further inform which features we should prioritize in BET+’s experience. I reviewed the following platforms:

 
 

Consistencies

  • Search results in grid view

  • Search page used to promote trending shows/browsing

  • No platform utilized filtering

  • Most platforms had added copy when “No Results” were found

  • Hover interaction in Desktop and CTV

Outliers

  • Netflix and Disney+ showed similar content to searched titles instead of a “No Results” message.

  • Netflix did not include content details, only showed content poster in search results. User had to select the poster to see added details.

  • Netflix showed related titles

 

Exploration

After sharing all of these insights with the team and getting their input, my manager thought this could be a great initiative to build out for the My5 brand. As I explored different design directions, I focused on key enhancements that were the standard with our peers or were specific asks from the user testing feedback. Here are the key enhancements I focused on:

 

Refinement

I shared the wireframe directions with our stakeholders at My5 and learned that including trending searches currently was not possible because that data was not being collected. But, plans to begin collecting that data were set for early 2024.

Based on the capabilities of the team, we decided to have two files: an MVP version that included the improvements to the search field, trending show recommendations and recent searches. We would save any features showcasing trending searches would be saved for a future implementation.

 

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