Elia Alberti
Product Designer
Prototypes
The following are examples of different approaches to the sport configurator area of the Sky Q STB where the users can pick their favourite sports and bundle them together configuring his own viewing experience.
Sport Configurator – Safe option
This first option of the sport configurator prototype has been identified as the safest option since each and every channels’ video keeps its original aspect ratio, making it much simpler to build (front end – back end) and keep up to date once launched, since videos can be easily swapped with new ones if needed without any major post editing effort.
Sport Configurator – Backdrop variant
With this version of the sport configurator prototype I wanted to explore the possibility of having channels’ videos playing in the background, behind the main gradient. The main downside to this solution is that part of the videos are covered by copy, thumbnails and screen gradient.
Sport Configurator – Diagonal Stripes
For this version of the sport configurator I got inspired by the most recent LG smart tv UI since the advantages of adopting the diagonal stripes as a menu element is that many more channels could be shown to the users due to the minimal amount of real estate used by the diagonal stripes.
About Sky
Sky is Europe’s largest media company and pay-TV broadcaster by revenue (as of 2018), with 23 million subscribers and more than 31,000 employees as of 2019.[5] The company is primarily involved in satellite television.
U.S. media and telecoms conglomerate Comcast acquired the entirety of Sky in 2018 for £17.28 per-share.
Before the acquisition by Comcast, Sky was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index and had a market capitalisation of approximately £18.75 billion (€26.76 billion) as of 2018.
What is the Sport configurator?
The sport configurator is an area of the Sky Q STB where the users can pick their favourite sports / channels and by doing so creating a customised viewing experience which fit their specific needs and habits.
The importance of Prototypes
Many ideas fail, not because they are flawed, but because people didn’t ‘get it’. It can be hard to imagine new products, services or features. That is where traditional specification documents and business plans fail. They do not excite people about the potential. They do not show them what could be.
Which is why working in Agile, I felt the need to prototype pretty much every design task for every sprint so to shows stakeholders, developer, PM and back-end, what I was going to build. That means everybody had the same picture of the end goal. It significantly reduces the need for people to ‘fill in the gaps’ with their imagination.
It’s also a great tool for user testing session, to gauge the level of engagement of a specific feature and further iterate if and when needed. Occasionally and particularly in the early days of a project, I had to make few assumptions about what users want. Some companies do market research, but just like stakeholders users often struggle to picture what it is you are proposing building.
Testing a prototype allows you to validate the assumptions you make and be confident you are building the right thing.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Sky Q STB users.
CLIENT
Sky