OPINION AND ANALYSIS
No limits on the UI/UX By Miles Weaver, marketing director, Airbeem
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n today’s OTT driven media world, the user interface the viewer encounters when they log into your service will determine the success of your service. End viewers do not care about what technology powers your platform. To them, all of that is invisible. What they care about, and what truly becomes important when deciding how you communicate the fundamental concept of value to your viewers, is the user experience. To your viewers, your ability to transcode, refine your metadata or distribute your content is irrelevant. These critical media management processes are fundamental to how your business delivers its content, but to the end user, it doesn’t make any difference to how they use or perceive the service. As long as the content is available and it plays on their device, the processes that delivers the content to their device is a level of complexity they don’t care about. They will remember and judge your service on how they navigate around your content, how it is presented to them and how they engage with it pre and post viewing. This is why it is so important to prioritise the user experience in a video service, as it is not only the critical pathway that audiences will access to get to your content, but also one of the main ways that they will build an opinion of your brand. For technology companies, this can be an awkward concept to acknowledge, but it remains true. Technology powers these services and makes them possible, ensuring that they are competitive, and capable of delivering the best functionality to service owners and their customers. But, for the people who will decide whether a service is a success or not – the viewers that pay for it - the majority of the technology is there to facilitate their viewing experience. The quality of their viewing experience (outside of playback) is dictated almost entirely by the UX.
10 | TVBEUROPE OCTOBER 2018
At Airbeem, we feel that the user experience is one of the key components to be prioritised if our customers are going to deliver a compelling offering to their customers. This is as important as having a compelling content library and commercial proposition. We have built our platform in a way that enables our customers to easily customise their user experience in order to keep the service fresh and continually deliver what the user wants. Many platforms can fall down when it comes to the UX. Offering something that is utterly compelling at launch is great, but it needs to keep up with changing trends and user behaviour. The digital space is moving fast, so to have a ‘shop window’ that takes years to update (due to cost or implementation time) is anathema to how modern digital businesses need to deliver their services. Having a customisable UI that can evolve gradually over time is essential to how a service as a whole can grow in line with the behaviour of its viewers. This not only keeps them engaged, but also creates a positive impression for them that the service is proactively responding and improving in relation to their behaviour. Over time, things could become even more refined, with the service tweaked and tailored to display different kinds of content dependent on the device type being used. For example, if you know that mobile viewers prefer viewing short form content on mobile, then make short form content available on mobile devices for them, with longer form given greater priority on big screen devices. It is not unreasonable to foresee a future where AI, if deployed properly, can tailor the individual UX of every user to suit their behaviour and provide the best possible experience for them on each device. Utilising a templated approach, you could give the AI a series of UI components to work across each device type. There could truly be a no limit future for UI/UX. n