Shopping

for Crackle

Exploring how to enable users to purchase products they see onscreen. A new way to shop from your couch

2022 • Product Design Lead

Responsibilities: IA, UX, UI

Team: CTO, VP of Design, Mobile Product Designer, Web Product Designer

Brief

As a free, ad-supported platform Crackle is always looking for new ways to monetize our content and present users with a viewing experience that doesn't overburden them with excessive and long ad-break interruptions. Additionally, advertisers and content producers have long wanted opportunities to build a greater connection with the viewing audience. Crackle has successfully built relationships with ad partners that are willing to foot the bill for production costs in exchange for deeper promotional considerations with the content that's produced. Giving users access to specific products that may appear in these titles would only serve to make these content production deals even more valuable for our advertising partners.

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Temporary UI of a shoppable item being shown onscreen.
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Viewing all of the shoppable items on the timelnie of the episode.
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A tray with all of the shoppable items for an individual episode.

Process

One thing that was unique about this project was that it was purely exploration. Because the end product was going to be a pitch that was intended to rally support from executives and potentially encourage outside investment, we weren't bound by the feasibility limitations of our current tech stack. With that, we set off to explore what a shopping experience on a TV might look like? To answer what were some of the pitfalls from a technological, device hardware, or customer adoption perspective might be? And how to best incorporate that into the experience of the Crackle app with the Crackle user base in mind.

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How to get from viewing an item onscreen to purchasing the item.

Execution

Because of our ability to pair original content with integrated sponsorship we used the use case of a Crackle original cooking show starring talent that has worked with Crackle in the past.

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Show detail screen with CTA to list of shoppable items.
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Screen displaying all shoppable items.
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Purchase screen for shoppable item.

Results

Since this was a proof-of-concept design exercise where the end product was a pitch to management, we didn't really have any measurable results to produce other than the positive reception we got from executives. However, not too long after we closed out the exercise we were made aware that Crackle was going to be involved in the Beta program for Amazon's Interactive Video Ads (IVA) which would introduce shopping actions to video ads. While a slightly different form factor, Amazon's IVA isn't too far off from some of the concepts we'd developed which we took as a good sign.

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Sample of Amazon's IVA interface