Launching Movies Anywhere
Your Movies, Together At Last
2018
Guy Schackman, Director of Product Design | Adeel Fahimullah, Sr. Product Designer | Eric Gandhi, Sr. Product Designer | Derek Vogal, Production Designer | Hilary Birkenstock, UX Research
Movies Anywhere is a collaboration between five major studios, Disney, Fox, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. Using a technology developed by Disney, Movies Anywhere allows you to purchase movies from any participating digital retailer allowing the user to store their movies in one digital library.
My Role
I joined Movies Anywhere before the service launched. My role was to work with our new design team to establish a design language, style guide, and build the user experience for Movies Anywhere 1.0.
Building Trust
The first step before talking about design was to establish trust with the engineering team. The team had been working hard to build an experience months before I arrived. I noticed they were wary of designers taking over the experience.
The goal of the design team was to establish a design process and work closely with the engineering team to ensure them that we only wanted what was best for Movies Anywhere and the user.
Using strategies like competitive analysis, user testing, and brainstorming sessions we were able to build trust with the engineering team.
Establish a Design Process
My first major project with the design team was to look at what was already created. The current designs put in place were based on concepts created by a marketing agency. This led to a product that had little to no considerations for the user experience. In addition, the product was designed to only fit tablet-sized screens.
The Design Process
01
Collaboration
We started by creating a culture of collaboration between product, design, and engineering teams. This collaboration allowed us to take into consideration the needs of each team.
02
All about the user
We wanted to make sure all future product decisions were looked at from a user perspective. Scope and technical capability were important, but if the experience was not serving the user we looked at ways of building features differently.
03
Test, Test, Test
Finally, we wanted to establish a user testing cadence. We brought in a UX research consultant that would run moderated tests every 2 weeks. Our responsibility as designers was to build prototypes of features to put in front of prospective users.
Content Density
Now with our design process established, we were able to start digging into the current designs. There were many tweaks we wanted to make the experience.
Design Goals
The ability for users to easily discover the breadth of our content.
Create an experience that aligns with the native platform for ease of use. (Apple’s HIG, Googles Material Design)
Create a consistent experience. (typography, sizing, and components)
Typography
Reducing the number of type styles helped clean up the experience and create more consistency
Reducing the type styles to just 7 styles.
Current
Original Design
Updated Designs
Infusing the Brand
The Movies Anywhere experience was built around a core idea, to bring your movies together in one place. This was what the experience was built on. We had a tool that did that, but it was missing something. We needed to infuse a personality. We worked with an outside branding agency called SALT to come up with the branding for Movies Anywhere. Our task was to incorpoate the new logo, type, and colors into the experience.
Brand Assets
Branding Explorations
Final Designs
We wanted to make sure the launch version of Movies Anywhere hit all the design goals set forth in the early stages.
Refining the interface to create the ability for the user to experience more content above the fold.
Relying on the platform (iOS, Android, Web) to dictate interactions to make the experience more familiar to the user
Building consistency with an adaptable grid, colors, and type
The Launch
Movies Anywhere launched on the web, mobile apps, and 10ft platforms in October of 2017 with over 7,300 movies available for Disney, FOX, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.
5.8 million user accounts and has topped 6 million app downloads in the first year
150 million purchased movies to their collections
16 million hours of watch time
Presenting Movies Anywhere at Disney Design Summit 2018