Virgin’s Best Bits
Wrapping up your year in entertainment!
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CLIENT: Virgin media
BRIEF: redesign virgin medias best bits to create a more compelling and sticky customer experience
WHEN: 2020/21
SPRINT: 3x 2 weeks (+ a UX cliche reprise)
WHO: STEVE (ux lead), tristan (visual design lead), matt (client services), Chris 1 (copy), chris 2 (data)
METHODS: PROBLEM SOLVING; USER FLOWS; USER JOURNEYS; PERSONAS; SCENARIOS; SKETCHING; RAPID PROTOTYPING; WIRE-FRAMING; USABILITY TESTING; SKETCH; INVISION; PRESENTING; STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT; COMPETITOR ANALYSIS; USER INTERVIEWS
FEEDBACK:
“It’s been brilliant working with Steve, right from the outset he’s digested a huge amount of background information. He’s provided a clear and structured approached for how he will complete the task and given consistent updates. Every stage there has been a rationale as to his suggestions and where there have been assumptions they’ve been shared and flagged in advance.”
Matt - Client Services
“His workshops have been great to understand Steve’s thinking, but more so our own. He has challenged all our pre-conceived actions from previous campaigns, to come at it from a fresh perspective for the next one.”
Tristan - Visual Design Lead
Virgin Media is one of the most well known telecoms providers in the UK, supplying broadband, TV and mobile services to millions of customers. The Virgin Media brand is playful, fun and irreverent; years in the making, it’s now ingrained into the fabric of British life.
However, Virgin had been facing customer retention challenges - some technical, some around perceived customer value, and some actual customer value. The technical challenges often revolved around stability of broadband supply, an issue far removed from the scope of our work.
Fortunately, customer value challenges are within our sphere of influence. This project was conceived to explore and address some of these.
Background
Virgin Media’s Best Bits is the part of the customer experience that aims to show the value of subscriptions, an experience made famous by the likes of Spotify and Strava. Research had shown that customers who were not realising the full value of their product holdings were more likely to cancel their subscription. The assumption was that retention would increase if customers knew more about how much they were using and what was on offer.
The goal of the product was to increase customer retention by a) showing the customer how much value they were getting from their subscriptions, and b) promoting the whole range of their product holdings. By leveraging usage data across broadband, TV and mobile, the product aimed to playback to the user, for example, their average download speed, the amount of time spent watching sports, number of text messages sent. The product sits behind the login on the Virgin Media website, with traffic driven by seasonal email and notification campaigns.
Brief
Redesign the existing Best Bits product to increase customer retention, applying latest branding. Work with strategists and data team to define what is feasible; work with in-house developers to deliver efficiently buildable designs.
Discovery
Through a series of meetings and workshops with stakeholders we soon established that:
we had limited dev time
the CMS was outdated
the available data had a three month lag
the brand and visual assets were strong
However, the roadmap allowed for a new CMS and data tech in 6-12 months, which we incorporated into our thinking. In the meantime though, we behaved like magpies, finding useful components, icons and images from across the Virgin Media estate.
A look at the competition showed us that there was an opportunity to open some clear ground between us and other providers:
The closest equivalent at BT was dry, lacking any compelling brand story or utility.
We also explored non-competitor brands who provide similar services , such as Strava, Monzo, Nest, Fitbit etc. The key takeaways from this included:
making the playback personal to the user
giving some ‘so what?’ to the data
including an element of social proof
showing progress over time
An objective evaluation of the current offering and usage data turned up a few red flags, foremost being that it had been designed desktop first, but most usage came on mobile. This meant that there was a very very very long mobile scroll.
A quick guerrilla test confirmed that people found the amount of content overwhelming on mobile. Digging a little deeper also uncovered that people didn’t really care about the data points shown - most people are not that keen to know that their download speed was average, or they used 4gb of mobile data.
The sprint playback focused on communicating these problems to solve in design:
users overwhelmed by content
an impersonal experience
making it less ‘so what?’
Design
We started exploring possible solutions, focused on two key areas - making content easier to navigate and making content more compelling. We made an assumption that we could remove the overwhelming content by making it clearer what content there was, making it easier to navigate. As ever, putting pen to paper helped us visualise, play and refine:
We began by identifying four navigation styles that could help prevent overwhelming our users - carousels, tabs, animated cards, collapsible blocks.
We refined these ideas, exploring how they might actually work, so that we could make recommendations during our next playback.
Given the time constraints we were only able to take one concept into testing. So we helped our stakeholders make the right decision - tabbed content ticked the most boxes.
With alignment on this key decision, other things began to fall into place as we explored the rest of the problems. We began to think about how we design this so it is efficient to build, so that it is ready for the new future data capability, and so that our customers care about the content.
A key pillar would be making the content relevant, giving it a grounding, leveraging the tone of voice - so that we can better communicate the value of the subscriptions.
This meant not talking about how fast their average broadband speed was, that’s a bit dull. Instead let’s tell them that their favourite movie genre to stream was action, that they were in the top 10% of action lovers in their area, and that the new Marvel movie is available to stream this month.
Sounds simple, but to make this work needed genius levels of copywriting x data to feed a content matrix. I am still in awe of Chris 1 and Chris 2, and forever thankful for their patience.
With that little problem solved, we had to start putting the whole thing together. This involved creating a content model with reusable modular components that could be built in the CMS. These components had catchy names such as dataslot_major and dataslot_minor. All of which were brought together in some midfi wireframes for a round of user testing.
A round of user testing helped us iron out some kinks. In the limited time we had, we repeated the user tests from Discovery, and focused on finding out:
- what customers thought the pages were about
- how they felt about the content
- could they find specific pieces of content on each page
We saw a vast improvement on the Discovery user test results. However we also found areas we needed to work on:
tone - we had to be mindful that some people might feel bad about some of their data, so it should always be celebratory
content limits - more than six or seven content modules in a tab was too many
know when to stop - avoid filler and heavy sales messages, especially when there’s not much interesting to say
We took all this onboard and folded it into our hi-fi designs ready for delivery, here’s a sample:
Fairly simple, right?
But a huge amount of effort went into getting it looking this clean and working this simply. Thankfully we had a bunch of happy stakeholders who had been on the journey with us, all of whom appreciated the potential of the designs to fix some customer problems.