Timeline
March 2022 - Jul 2022
Goal
Uplift U-NEXT’s search with an intermediate approach to Auto-complete, based on User and Business needs.
Responsibilities
Lead Product Design for Web and Mobile initiatives.
Supervised TV autosuggestion ideations.
TL;DR of my impact
The challenge
When the U-NEXT team set out to improve search, the challenge seemed simple: make finding content faster.
But behind the scenes, the reality was complex—business expectations, engineering constraints, political battles and user frustrations that pointed in different directions.
How did we focus?
Because of these many issues, we decided to go with solving the political battle first.
Why?
There was a lot of "Ne-Mawashi" internally regarding how complex autosuggest and autocomplete was. This meant delays, high costs, and a significant risk of user churn.
We needed to prove to business stakeholders and the lead PO that it was possible to launch the search project with the current tech and design system.
Prototype from Dev.
Desktop research regarding Autosuggest and Autocomplete UX.
Turning conflict into opportunity
Core Team
Principal Product Manager
Senior BackEnd Dev
Lead Product Designer (Me)
UXUI Designer
Reporting Team
COO
PO Principal
Principal Engineer
Lead Mobile Devs (2)
Lead Web Dev (2)
My responsibilities
Conducted the overall Desktop Research on Autosuggest Search and the differences to Autocomplete.
Designed and documented Autosuggest Experiences for:
Mobile Apps: iOS and Android.
Web Desktop and Responsive views.
Conducted Stakeholder Interviews to navigate politics and gather valuable insights.
Facilitated ideation, discussion and work sessions with main and broader team.
Led Desktop research for TV and initial ideation.
Delegated and supervise TV autosuggest initiatives.
[1] Mobile exploration
[2] Web exploration
The previous design experience
The design strategy of the previous design was damaging the experience by having the genres list appear in a small component.
Intersection between clicking the search bar and keyboard activation.
Results
Got immediate buying from business stakeholders, PO leads, and Dev leads.
Successful A/B test that propelled implementation.
Reduced the project timeline from the perceived 5 years, to only 4 months, thanks to our strategy of focusing in the current tech and current design system.
Opened up the TV search project for implementing Autosuggested experiences.
Web Design
Mobile Design
Take aways and Learnings
Having empathy for business stakeholders and developers gave us a lot of insights that crafted the needed strategy to uplift the project.
Due to complications with TV and other projects, we couldn’t launch in all devices, but gave me the opportunity to lead the design process for TV and delegate the work.
Sometimes simplicity is best, and product teams can create great things when using the current tech we have for innovation.
Other case studies
