New approach to browsing increases conversion

THE RESEARCH PROCESS

Video Diary Study

A critical piece of this re-design was our video diary study. We took 20 new users and had them record their impressions of their digital life at the end of each day—how often they used the app, what they used it for, what other digital technology they used that day, and what their daily life was like in general. This provided a much deeper understanding of the motivations behind our users, and ultimately re-framed the way people internally thought about our users.

Our key insight was that our users fell into four different categories based on their browsing intentions:

1. The Researcher: They were coming to educate themselves on a particular topic of interest. More in common with TED users than Netflix users.

2. The Relaxer: They wanted to sit back and watch for entertainment, but wanted to consume more enlightening content than what is available on most streaming video platforms.

3. The Practitioner: They wanted to practice yoga or meditation, and had almost no interest in watching any of our other content. Based on video consumption data, we estimated these at 20% of our audience.

STRATEGY

Leveraging Our New User Types

Based on our newly devised user categories, we could implement some new guiding principles for the redesign.

1. Have a separate category for our Yoga + Meditation users. They weren’t interested in anything else, so we could optimize the experience for them by giving them their own quarantined area, focused on their needs, available in the main navigation.

2. Provide a place for our “Researcher” types to quickly find exactly what they’re looking for via an information-dense Topics section.

3. Create a through-line for finding more videos you want based on your interest types by adding Topic tags to pieces of content. Clicking on a tag takes you to a Topic page full of all content with that tag.

4. Break-up our browsing pages into clearly labelled “new” and “popular” so our “Relaxer” types didn’t have to do much heavy lifting to find something they’d be happy with.

SOLUTIONS

New Navigation

Our previous usability testing had shown us that users didn’t pay much attention to the top navigation past the first few items.

So, we decided to combine categories into one central point—Browse—and make that page itself a highlight of each category for easy browsing. The extra navigation would be located there where it felt less overwhelming and was matched more to user intentions.

We condensed the second line of navigation into a dropdown to allow a cleaner implementation of a new navigation overlay UI.

SOLUTIONS

Browsing Page

Adding this page allowed us to widen our funnel of guiding lost users, as well as creating more targeted out flows to key locations. The most important features of the browsing experience:

• Features a foothold into all of the major Gaia categories, so users don’t need to laboriously click through every top navigation item just to see what kind of content it contains—they have one central place to get a sense of each category.

• Each row on the Browse page links to a main category page that features similar layouts featuring the most important row types.

• Popularity weighted with timeliness allowed us to target our “Relaxers” user type extremely effectively.

• Adding Articles, an under-used resource leftover from lead generation efforts, provided more information for our “Researcher” user type.

SOLUTIONS

New Detail Page

We made several important changes to our detail page scheme:

1. Added a full list of episodes to each video detail page, so there was no extra step of navigation to the “Series” page to reach the full episode list.

2. Added Topic tags to the header, so that users could quickly find more videos similar to one they are particularly interested in.

3. The key action buttons were relocated to a more obvious and findable location.

4. Expanded the size and span of the header to accommodate playing video previews automatically.

SOLUTION

New Home Page

User interviews and data analytics into viewing behavior had revealed there were eight main topic categories that each user’s primary interests could be grouped into.

These were made the default rows on the new home page, so that new users after sign-up are immediately exposed to something likely to be of interest to them.

A hover state was added to replace the previous metadata—allowing for more context for thumbnails of interest, and also allowing the grid to be more condensed with the removal of the metadata area.