As Principal Designer, I led the design team to create a world class SVOD and AVOD experience across multiple platforms, with 25 million monthly active users in 30 countries and 3 continents.
We successfully launched our first native SVOD experiences with an overhauled design for Android mobile, Android TV, web and later on iOS. Our target audience was South East Asia where 85% of our users had Android devices, 15% on iOS, cash was light and data was gold.
Our UI was redesigned to improve featured title engagement, multilingual support and player functionality.
We introduced a large portrait feature carousel, complete with primary actions positioned within thumb range, resulting in a 54% increase in featured trailer minutes watched and a 38% increase in conversion to view on featured titles. Through user interviews we found that subtitles were an important condition for conversion to view, so we redesigned our title pages and prioritised the meta-data accordingly. We also updated the player with improved subtitle, episode selection and chromecast experiences.
We had pricked the interest of Disney, so we put together a proposal to feature themed channels and collections to support Disney content among other content partners and genres. This secured a 4 million dollar deal with Disney, which helped boost our monthly active users from 2 million to 4 million users.
iflix 2.5 also introduced a right to left UI for our new Middle-Eastern and African markets, which brought with it some interesting new challenges.
Our new markets, partners and UI helped our Android app rating improve from 2.8 to 3.8 on the play store.
The iflix 2.5 channels supported a live channel feed as well as catch up content, while collections were simply a collection of titles. Each page was given its own theme and background images were cut into multiple layers to create a visually appealing paralax scroll effect.
We saw a substantial increase from 600 million to 2.1 billion minutes watched within 6 months of launching our partner channels.
iflix 2.5 partner channel selection on web.
iflix 2.5 partner collection on web.
iflix kids 2.5 on web.
Our paywall subscription wasn’t working in emerging markets. People would often forget they had a 30 day free trial or assume it had run out before we had a chance to convert them to paying users.
‘Freemium’ was born. We designed an AVOD experience where people could browse our catalogue without the need to signup or pay. This gave people more visibility over our content and search engines could now crawl our website, which greatly improved our SEO.
We used A/B and user testing via Lookback to reimagine our onboarding flows, removing barriers to entry and allowing users to watch free content with ads and without signing up. Users could remove ads and access our premium titles by signing up to receive a VIP trial and proceed to pay for a day, month or year of VIP.
The launch of iflix 3.0 resulted in a 30% increase in viewing conversions, 27% increase in minutes and 17% more time spent in app. Our Android app rating also improved from 3.8 to 4.3 on the play store, while our iOS app rating improved from 2.1 to 4.3 on the app store.
We’d captured night-time and weekend viewers with our ‘long form’ series and movie content, so we turned our attention to capturing the audience who had limited viewing time, like waiting for a bus or sitting on a train.
To capture these users, we created the feed. This opened up another gateway for advertising revenue and ‘long form’ content discovery with a curated list of trailers, short clips, sports highlights and ads.
We won the rights to the Malaysian Football League, so we upgraded our Live TV with the intention of introducing social comments to increase engagement. People flocked to our Live TV, increasing our monthly active users by 1.4 million, but unfortunately our retainment rate on these users was low with less than 1% converting to paid users.
We updated our title pages with a player at the top, so users could watch in either portrait or landscape. This enabled users to watch trailers and view title meta-data in one place before committing to view. This also set us up so users could easily swipe down to dismiss the page or enter picture in picture mode if video was still playing.
Our iflix exclusives were themed to make them stand out from the rest and to go above and beyond what our competitors were doing to bring some wow factor.
Feed
Live TV EPG
Live TV Channel
Series
Movie
iflix Exclusive
This was our future concept for iflix, which focussed on getting users engaged in content via trailers. Home now featured a carousel of trailers at the top, which allowed people to seamlessly browse our featured trailers until they found something that caught their attention. New coming soon and live tv rows included the autoplay feature, to help people discover upcoming content and catch their eye on live news headlines.
Movie posters were portrait and series posters were now landscape, so people could easily distinguish between them when choosing something to watch.
Each row had 2 levels of posters to get more titles into the vertical view, as we found that most horizontal row scrolling occurred within the first 4 rows and most people tended to scroll the page vertically thereafter.
Channels were also given an update to really show off each brand and the UI had a dark mode available, although we were leaning back to making it permanently dark.
