Project Name
Verizon Kids Experience
Category
Product Design
Media Entertainment
Overview
Verizon's TV product FCL comes with streaming and live tv features. One of the features is the 'Kids experience' within the FCL product. However, this experience was very outdated and hardly used by the audience it was intended for. Verizon wanted a team at my agency to redesign the experience to give it a more modern look and feel and also allow it to bee cohesive with the rest of the TV design system we had recently updated.
The Why
With the rise in streaming services making more and more content to accommodate to kids, Verizon had to also present their approach to this rise in demand. Their competitors such as Disney+, Netflix and Amazon Prime had already created a modern kids accommodating experience within their product and Verizon couldn't get left behind.
I had also recently updated a lot of Verizon's TV products such as FCL, Stream TV and Fios TV Core. The design system used new components and colours and the Kid's experience needed to incorporate these new updates.
Design goals
The goal of this project was to create a modern kids experience that could rival Verizon's competitors. The design had to be centered around parental use as even though children were my target audience, parents would use the product with them. The design had to be simplistic as well as easy to navigate and understand.
I wanted to create an experience that had friendly and safe content, adapts to the watching habit of the user and grows with the user as they age.
Research
To get a deeper understanding of how children engage with content, I interviewed parents who had children whose ages ranged from 2 years old all the way to 15 years old. I gathered very rich information concerning watch habits, content they like, platforms they watch content on and the psychology of how children think in relation to content and their age.
I also conducted secondary research on 12 different streaming platforms and I measured them against what features I wanted to incorporate into Verizons' experience. The platforms that stood out the most were the ones we hyperfocused in on.
My researched allowed us to gain an understanding of how children thought and used streaming services and what competitors are doing to capture the attention of children. I could then apply thsi knowledge to inform my design choices for the MVP.
Solutions
I had revised the design a few times before Verizon and I were happy with the MVP. I had created features that I then took away and stripped the entire experience down so that it could operate at it's most simplest form. The designs for the MVP that was launched Q4 of 2023 are below. I decided to go with an approach where the Kids experience didn't differ too much in UI from the Core experience. However, the content shown and parental access we're the main differences within the Kids experience
Takeaway
This project was very eye opening for me and a great experience. I took an idea from concept to MVP and learned all the ups and downs, best practices, do's and don't's along the way. This project really shaped my mind as a designer and opened me up more to the strategic, psychological and consultant phase of design which I really liked and want to explore more.
After the launch of the MVP, the experience was doing very well Q1 of 2024. As this was an MVP we decided to continue working on the experience, gathering more insightful research and thinking more strategically about how we can better the experience. A new and improved Kids experience will be on the way soon!
This will hide itself!