Disney Plus | Kyle Ng Design

Disney Plus: Adding features to the existing design

Background

Disney+ is a streaming platform for entertainment from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic. Disney+ was launched on November 12, 2019, in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, and expanded to Australia, New Zealand, and Puerto Rico a week later. It is currently available in 53 countries. The service has 118.1 million global subscribers as of October 2021.

Problem

As any parent cares about their kids’ sleep time. With so much excellent content available on Disney+, Kids may spend a long time in Disney+ till very late at night. When parents want to track back their kids' watch history, there is no way for them to look back. This leads to parents having to look back at the history of the browser they use, which is not very effective and can be tiring for the parents. There is also no feature under parental control for parents to limit their kids’ activity on Disney+.

Our Solution

Having a feature in the Disney+ that allows parents to track back their kids’ watch history and to limit their kids’ screen-time at a specific time will provide convenience to parents.

Goals and Objectives

PROJECT GOAL:

The goal of this project is to add a feature to the Disney+ that allows parents to track back their kids’ watch history and to limit their kids’ screen time. There will be no changes or redesigns made to the brand or style guide of Disney+.

RESEARCH GOAL:

Through research, we want to be able to confirm if our assumed problem and solution are valid. Then, we want to learn how this problem is affecting parent users of Disney+ and how they currently try to solve it. We also want to identify how this feature of viewing watch history and setting a screen-time limit is being incorporated in other popular platforms like Netflix.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE:

Understand the significance of viewing watch history in the streaming platform.
Determine what difficulties parents experience when trying to look back at the “watch history” and limit children’s screen-time usage?
Identify other competitors’ sites that currently have a feature like viewing watch history and setting parental control.

Duration: 2 weeks (80 hours)
Role: UI/UX Designer
Tools: Figma, Whimsical

High Fidelity Designs

Feature 1: allow users to view, search, and delete the watch history.

Feature 2: allow users to set the screen time usage and the auto shut off when the maximum time limit is reached.

Prototype

All participants accessed the prototype with their own desktop devices

Research

I began with secondary research to learn what makes a feature like viewing the watch history effective and valuable in a service or product. Therefore, I was able to identify other streaming platforms that use similar features and conducted a competitive analysis.

Competitive Analysis

User Interview

After the initial research, I conducted user interviews in order to ask users with young children their thoughts about the assumed problem and the solution to solve it. I also asked participants about the current methods they use to control their children's screen time usage.

Participants

• 3 participants total

• Parents of young children who have access to their own streaming services

KEY FINDINGS:

all participants would look for the watch history for the shows they watched before
all participants were concerned about their children's watch time usage
2 of 3 participants have screen time issues in their household

Persona

Based on the data from user interviews, I created a persona that I felt represented a potential user.

Define

Storyboard

After the persona was made, I created a scenario that a potential user who would benefit from having features like viewing the watch history and setting the screen time limit.

Task Flow

After my research phase, I created a task flow that focused on the two main tasks parents would want to do: Viewing watch history and Setting screen time limit

Ideate

I made sketches and low-fidelity wireframes of how the watch history and screen time limit would be integrated into Disney Plus's existing design as well as the different ways a user could interact with the features.

Sketches

Low-fidelity Wireframes

Based on a combination of sketches, I mocked up low-fidelity wireframes in Figma. It helped me get my ideas from sketches to screen in a fast way.

High-fidelity Designs

I used the same style-tile and UI elements from Disney Plus to create high-fidelity designs to get ready for testing.

Testing

Usability Testing

After I finished designing my high-fidelity mobile screens, I wrote up a usability test plan. For this test, I chose tasks that would leave the participants to interact with the new features.

Participants:

Parents of young children
Parents who have streamed movies/shows for children regularly

TEST OBJECTIVES:

To see how easily can users view the watch history and search the history.
To understand what difficulties do users encounter when viewing and searching the watch history.
To see how easily can users navigate to screen time controls and set the screen time limits.
What difficulties or confusion do users experience with the remaining time screen and time’s up notification pop up.

TASKS:

Open the Disney+ desktop site, navigate to the “Watch History” Page, and try to search the movie in history and delete the history.
Navigate to the “Screen time” control page and set the screen time limits.
View the “Time-reminder” screen and the “Times up” screen.

KEY FINDINIGS

Found difficult to view the screen time setting page because the border size is too small.
Prefer more information like movie pictures and movie year shown on the “Watch History” pages
Prefer buttons to turn on or turn off the screen time for individual days.

Iterations

Using the feedback from the usability testing, I made revisions to my design.

I added movie pictures and details of movies on the “Watch History” page so that users can get more information on the history page

Enlarge the size of the screen-time setting border and re-design choices for turn-on time, turn-off time, and time limit.
Create turn-on and turn-off buttons for individual days which allows users to restrict the screen time usage for a whole day.

Conclusion

KEY LEARNINGS:

While trying to allow users the least amount of steps possible to complete a task, it is important to not compromise error prevention.
Creating task flows can be helpful during the design phase to show the micro-interaction of the design when working on smaller-scale projects like this.

CHALLENGING:

It was difficult to find participants who have children and also subscribed to Disney Plus.
I needed to subscribe to Disney Plus in order to get a better understanding of their elements and assets.

NEXT STEPS:

Conduct usability tests with participants who haven't subscribed to Disney Plus but subscribed to other streaming platforms, and test the design from their point of view.
Create designs for how the new feature would look if users were viewing Disney Plus with the mobile app.
Continue to test the revisions and alternative designs that were made.