CTV App Relaunch

Brief

I was brought on at Crackle to lead the product design efforts for the company's CTV apps. The first and largest task on my plate was to relaunch all of the CTV apps with a new UI. No big deal. When I joined, the VP of Design had already established a refreshed brand and a base set of screens for a new UI, which had been approved by leadership. Development had already started on the new app for Vizio TV's so I had to work quickly to flesh out the rest of the experience in a cross-platform compatible way.

Process

The existing Crackle apps were so outdated that our development teams were starting from scratch and from a design perspective, the legacy interfaces weren't a useful starting point to build off of. At every step of the way we tried to perform exhaustive competitive analysis, observe what was working, what wasn't, and where there were opportunities to lead the way.

Behind all of this was our desire to lean on native components and experiences wherever possible. While it may make it easier to develop a design library by forcing an identical UI upon all users regardless of the platform they open your app on, the development complexities that arise from that as well as the confusion it creates for users is not worth the sacrifice. At this point we've all seen other streaming services take the opposite approach and the reactions from users has not been positive.

That said, there was still a balance that needed to be struck. So we paired our exhaustive competitive analysis with explorations of various in-market UX patterns and user testing to arrive at an app that takes full advantage of the native UX patterns of the devices that users have brought into their homes and also provides a consistently top-tier experience.

Execution

The MVP version of our relaunched apps consisted of a standard home screen with a single featured item in the hero position and a slew of curated trays of content below. We also offed search functionality, a basic browse experience for TV shows & movies, and some parental controls for families to limit what content their household is able to watch.

One of the greatest features of Crackle in addition to it being free is that it doesn't require you to have an account and be signed in to use the service. For users that are logged in, we're able to offer additional features like a Watchlist. That made authentication an easy choice for a fast-follow after our MVP release.

Results

Buoyed by the low expectations of a neglected legacy app, the improvement in our metrics post-launch exceeded expectations. We were able to not only attracting and retaining more users, but also provide them with an experience that resulted in them watching more content and thus viewing more ads. That lead to large increases in ARPU.

The new Vizio app had 10% year-over-year growth in unique users from Q4 2021 to Q4 2022. The new Samsung app had a month-over-month increase in minutes watched by 40% (Q4 2022 vs Q1 2022). Thew new Roku app saw a 64% increase in streams month-over-month (Q4 2021 vs Q1 2022) and a 27% increase month-over-month in minutes watched (Q4 2021 vs Q1 2022). We also saw a 72% in MAU month-over-month (Q4 2021 vs. Q1 2022) for the new Roku app.

Our simplified authentication process that pushed users to sign up or sign in on their mobile device lead to a 1900% recurring monthly growth in signups.