Subtitle Styling
for Crackle
Putting accessibility and our users first
2023 • Product Design Lead
Responsibilities: IA, UX, UI
Team: Director of Product, Front-End Engineers, Web Product Designer
Brief
All too often we see streaming services put their bottom line or the priorities of their investors above their users. We, as the design team at Crackle try as best we can to always put our users first. One place where we felt the streaming industry as a whole is short-changing users is through caption and subtitle styling. For better or worse, the requirements for subtitle styling has been standardized for decades. While that means the standards haven't evolved much, it also means that these requirements are well-support by all of the major video players that are used by streaming services, leaving no excuse for for every streaming service to have fully customizable subtitle styling.
Process
For this project we started by researching the longstanding legal requirements, comparing that with the existing capabilities of our video player, Bitmovin, as well as the subtitle styling options available on other streaming services. We came out of that with a few different prospective paths for how to potentially display these settings to a user as well as a slew of implementation questions. We organized a couple of working sessions with our counterparts in Product and Engineering to sort out the implementation details.
Execution
Given the required number of options for each of the many subtitle settings we knew that the organization of the matrix of options would be challenging within the constrained real estate of a TV screen. We devised a few different organizational structures, some very flat, others more hierarchical, and some segmented with basic and advanced options.
We put several options in front of users for testing and the clear winner was the one we dubbed the "firehose" because it has all of the options laid out up front. Users preferred that over the hierarchical options because some felt like they got lost navigating in and out of second and third-level menus. It also utilized the same hierarchy as the basic/advanced option but with requiring fewer button presses, which users also liked.
Results
We're waiting for this feature to be rolled out to all platforms before can we report on it's impact and usage.