TV Guide Concept Design
Tablet explorations.
The Problem:
Finding new content to watch on Twitch is challenging. The discovery surfaces prioritize live content. Schedules offer into appointment viewing, allowing customers to hang around or come back if there is a stream they are interested in watching soon.
The Solution:
The process outlined here is speculative design work for a TV guide concept. The proposal outlined adding a TV guide to the following directory.
Company
Twitch
Role
Sr. Product Designer
Year
2020 - 2021
✦ Web application ✦ Concept Design ✦ Discovery
The above diagram outlines the ranking of recommendations within the current “shelf” structure and a dynamic structure without labels.
This diagram introduces the concept of ranking by channel chronology. What is happening now, upcoming soon, past..
The next step was to look at how recommendations ranking would interplay with channel state chronology.
For viewers who follow many channels, the left navigation is where they are most prominently displayed. The left nav displays lived followed channels and recommendations. It was important with this project to differentiate the use cases of these surfaces.
An exploration showing TV guide in many positions on the page, including redundancy.
An exploration displaying Live ongoing content with upcoming soon.
Component overview showing various densities and states.
On hover, pop out cards to show even more details of the segment. Using my favorite example, Big Bird. Since Twitch is a creative marketplace, a good rule of thumb is: If it looks good with Big Bird, it will look good in most channels.
Mobile explorations of various densities.
Results:
In the end, this was a design led project that was conceptual in nature. Unfortunately after development, the project was never released. The reasoning being that schedule adoption needed to increase to make the TV guide more impactful.
This project was a little ahead of it’s time. Schedule segments were a new product and had not yet been ingested into the recommendations algorithm. This was another reason that the project was not released. Executives were concerned about the relevancy of the content and did not feel comfortable only using followed channels (for viewers who had more than 20 followed channels).
Ultimately it’s hard to see a project like this one be shelved, but I am still proud of the work that I did with my team. Maybe one day we will see a TV Guide on Twitch!