Saving OTT users 18 minutes every session!
Timeline
3 months
in 2023
Type of project
Mobile & TV app
My Role
Solo Designer
Flowflix is an OTT aggregator designed to help users decide what to watch - fast.
OTT (Over-the-top) - media streaming service offered to users directly over the internet.
Examples include, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Hulu.
Take a quick look at the concept video here
The problem
“Endless choices don’t set you free—sometimes they leave you stuck. This is called the paradox of choice.”
OTT platforms promised variety, but today’s users are overloaded. Scrolling through apps, comparing, and second-guessing consumes time and creates frustration:
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Decision fatigue from too many options.
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Users delay or abandon watching due to overwhelm.
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Frustration leads to lower engagement and negative brand perception.
What is the paradox of choice?
Research & Insights
I interviewed avid OTT users (generative research) and studied industry reports (secondary research). The 9 participants in the research process for this project consisted of users from 5 different countries including USA, India, Taiwan, Australia and South Africa.
Key Influences on Users for picking a title
Key Discoveries from user interviews
Validated Assumption
Paradox of choice is wasting users a lot of time. 3 of the users even mentioned quitting browsing when they reached a point of frustration where they couldn’t make up their mind.
Hypothesis Invalidated
Paradox of choice is not always a problem. Users said it was sometimes fun to randomly browse (especially when they had lot of time.) This is akin to how some shoppers like to simply browse stores, without any focused intention.
Mood
The most influencing factor seems to be mood. Though it is an ambiguous factor, when mood isn't matched all other factors fail.
Ratings
The second most popular influencing factor seemed to be ratings. The popularity of this measure, is proven by the existence of companies like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, who sway the consensus of society’s perception of a movie or show.
Social Ratings
eg; Top 10 Tv shows in the country
Suggestions by friends & family
These were trusted more than algorithmic suggestions as friends/family share similar tastes.
Key Influences on time taken to decide
1. If the mood is matched.
2. Time available in a given session
Ideating the solution
How might we help OTT users deal with the 'paradox of choice'
when faced with endless lists of movies and TV shows?
Brainstorming - Going wide
Implementation - Converging
To help user satiate their mood with content.
Mood matching
Give users ample ratings & rankings to help them judge how good/bad a title is.
Ratings + In-depth
Rankings (inter genre)
Point users towards popular content.
Social Information
Bringing back shuffle play but instead of starting a title immediately, the user gets to choose by watching a trailer/teaser and shuffle until they find the right one.
Random
Play
Aggregation of
Platforms
Though this isn't a novel idea, all the above features would work only if all the platforms are available to user in one location.
How this step changed my approach to the solution
I initially wanted to create a sequential-selection experience, wherein a user is led through questions to arrive at a pin-pointed list of titles. But during convergence and after evaluation of each idea, I found these problems would occur with such an experience:
Too many clicks to get to the results. reviewers.
Restricts freedom of choice that browsing offers.
Not intuitive to users as it would be different from the industry norm.
For this reason I decided to employ the industry standard catalogue format, and implement the above mentioned ideas into it. This would be a better balance of freedom and focus user attention towards making a decision.
Building the solution
Low-fidelity designs
High-Fidelity Designs
I created wireframes for a mobile app and a Television app as they are two most popular devices for OTT usage. Though both have identical UI, I kept in mind that the methods of navigation for mobile and TV are completely different. Mobile uses touch and a TV uses a remote-controller or voice-inputs. The basic layouts however aren’t far-removed from the conventional layout employed in most OTT platforms.
In both the mobile app and TV app, I decided to introduce the newer features in an unobtrusive way. This ensures the app matches the mental model that users have of OTT apps. For this reason, parts of the app looks much like a traditional OTT platform. The newer features are punctuated in the catalogue, in-between different categories in the home page. I also placed shortcuts to these features in the bottom navigation bar, for frequent users.
Prototype
Please access the prototypes below.
Outcomes & Results
Usability test - Flowflix proved to be an effective solution for the ‘paradox of choice’ and it was agreed to by all the participants of the usability test as helpful in ‘deciding what to watch’. The ‘Find by mood’ and ‘Find by ratings’ features received the most positive feedback from users and 4 of 5 participants stated that they saw it saving them time.
What worked
At the end of the tasks all the participants felt that they would use this app over the traditional methods, due to “Find by” options and due to its aggregation of OTTs. Moods and Rankings were agreed on as the most sought out parameters when looking for content.
Effectiveness
Some users took longer with tasks than others. This could be because it was their first time with the app, as all of them said the tasks were easy and quite intuitive once they took time and went through the app.
Efficiency
Users verbally answered a SUS (System usability scale) test. The results were neutral to very positive. Here are the results.
Satisfaction
The “Find By” feature was the highlight, especially “By mood”.
What didn't work
2 interviewees supposed that the mood and ratings worked in conjunction with each other. In other words, they thought selecting "mood" first, "ratings" would work as a filter that would apply on top of that.
Couple of participants felt there was a clash between the traditional 'explore' categories and the moods or ratings categories. For instance, "Action and Adventure" did not seem very different from "Exciting".
On first look, 1 participant felt that the Entertainment news section felt like ads had made their way into the app and it seemed like a turn off for them.
Iteration
How problems were addressed
1. The confusion of "By mood" and "By ratings" tabs working as filter together, instead of separate pages was addressed by:
a. Using more than one indicator of selection in conjunction with the prefix “or” will help users differentiate clearly.
b. I decided it was best to keep the tabs separate as some users in usability testing said they use moods or ratings exclusively.
2. Not clear enough distinction between explore and “by mood” pages.
a. After evaluation, I realised that the actual problem was with the categorisation wording. The moods tab has generic titles and employing more non-traditional quirky titles that users are not used to, will encourage them to read it and get a better understanding of categories and therefore view them as distinct from explore. Moreover, clubbing mood and ratings into explore could make the page cumbersome. with the prefix “or” will help users differentiate clearly.
3. Entertainment news section was confused with ads.
a. The participant said that “news' sounded like ads, but maybe if it’s called something more casual like Entertainment buzz, Top stories, Hot stories or Top buzz, then its association with selling something to the user could change.
b. Annotations describing this feature for the use case of ‘first-time login’ (without any data from user’s OTTs that could be utilized), could describe that this news would feature user specific topics. In case of available data annotations could say, “These suggestions are based on your viewing data. The more you view and like or dislike content, the better the suggestions.”
Final results overview
About 75% of users choose content within 2 minutes.
18 minutes saved per session, and decision-related frustration sharply dropped.
“It feels like someone finally understood my struggle.
I spend more time watching and less time choosing.”
What I Learned
Solving for clarity and ease of decision-making matters as much as good visuals. Flowflix taught me to let user feedback drive solutions, to prioritize cognitive simplicity, and to value continuous iteration.
Next Steps
I plan to explore AI-driven recommendations and expand research to broader audiences.
Thank you for giving it a read!
Any feedback would be appreciated.
Nikhil Cheerla