BT Sport

Context

With the migration to a new CMS (Adobe AEM), BT Sport took the opportunity to review the design of some of the pages in order to improve engagement.

The main business goals being :

  • Drive deeper content engagement

  • Drive sales of BT products

  • Reduce churn rom BT products

  • Improve CSAT

Hero section of the redesigned page

Discovery

The type of content produced on BT sport is mainly video content and one of the pages that receives more traffic together with the Homepage is the Watch page. Data showed us that the CTR from the watch page to video content was quite low considering that the entries to the actual page were high.

In order to get more insights around how people engage with the page we conducted some user testing.

Some of the main takeouts from the testing :

  • People mainly engage with live events and the need to have quick access to them

  • Live events were positioned on the page in a sparse way so that it was quite difficult for people to pinpoint content relevant to them.

  • People need to know in a simple way what is paid and free content

  • People are confused by the clusters of content (AEM template) that don’t seem to be categorised per type

  • People feel content is overwhelming (very long page)

  • People find it very difficult to compare the content type they might want to engage with

  • Quite confusing to navigate to different sports from within the video page

Example of what some users defined as confusing (AEM template where content is quite jarring ) . This is a section of the current HP.

“Looks a bit all over the place and some of these small images don’t help me understand what this content is about” "(quote from a customer)

Competitors Analisys

I started collecting screenshots of competitors

Ideation

Should we / How might we

Having identified our main user needs we got together and started discussing opportunities

  • HMW improve navigation and content recirculation?

  • HMW simplify decision making around what content to watch ?

  • HMW improve content engagegent?

Hypotheses

Having brainstormed opportunities we discussed hypotheses around what to test in our prototype

  • We know people love live content and we believe we will achieve a deeper content engagement if our users have easy access to it. We will achieve this by bringing live events on top of the page (as a hero banner component)

  • By simplifying the navigation to to specific sports sections we will improve findability of content

  • We will simplify content comparison and reduce cognitive load by implementing a clearer way of showcasing content (both for type of content and for paid and free content)

Design and Test

I came up with a few design options and prototypes to share with the wider squad,. In the video example below I have created in Figma a prototype where a clip preview is displayed when hovering on the clip, the clip expands to add more detail in the description. During user testing this proved to help users around decision making, not necessary on live clips, but more specifically on content such as documentaries and BT sport films where people wanted to have a bit more details before committing to a longer clip

In the lab our Hypotheses tested well and after a couple of iterations and user tests we were able to address some of the issues that were unraveled from the initial test . These helped me focus on some design solutions that in the long run proved to be successful

Free vs Paid Content:

Signposting free vs paid event reduced frustration derived from having to click to access the video page in order to find out if the video was free or not

Inline Navigation: to create a simpler way of content recirculation, without changing the IA of the website I created quick entry points to the specific sport sections.

Rails of content: allowed editors to present content in a more organised way and for users it was a quick win as stacked rails help content comparison and therefore decision making. We observed this by seeing less scrolling time on the page.

Live Events: bringing the watch live component gallery at the top of the page proved to be what users were asking for. We knew this from User testing and also in the long run we observed an increase in content engagement: the live events entry points helped increase pvs per sessions (we used the same component on the live video page).

Results

We had planned several new items for the next iterations. The main one being profiling customers and start working around personalisation. What we had just started doing was testing different types of content on the suggestions of “what to watch next” in order to gather insights on what related content would create more recirculation for what type of user.

By reviewing the hierarchy on the page and by simplifying the navigation to the other sport sections BT Sport in the course of the following 9 months registered a 5% increase of avg video views per session. The presentation of the live content in a new and revamped way and the promotion of BT sport films and documentaries through the addition of a specific section contributed to reduce churn from BT Sport packages by 5% and increased sales of BT Sport by 1%.

This below is the final build of the watch page