The Secret to Crafting an Engaging UX/UI for Streaming Services
A standout user experience (UX) isn’t just nice-to-have—it’s a necessity. With countless streaming platforms competing for viewers’ attention, having a seamless, content-focused user interface (UI) can turn occasional viewers into loyal subscribers. At Magine Pro, we understand that crafting an engaging UX/UI is essential for improving user satisfaction and retention rates.
Introducing Our Expert E-Guide: Behind the Screens
In our latest e-guide, Behind the Screens: Crafting Immersive UX/UI for Streaming Services, we provide operators with essential insights needed to create a cohesive and engaging UX/UI. Drawing from our years of consumer market experience and expertise as a leading OTT platform provider, we have distilled proven strategies that elevate the viewing experience.
What You Will Discover
Packed with insights, this guide covers:
- Intuitive Navigation and Content Discovery: Learn proven strategies that keep users engaged and enhance satisfaction.
- Responsive Design Practices: Discover how to ensure seamless user experiences across all devices, fostering brand loyalty.
- Tools and Techniques for Viewer Engagement: Implement practical methods to maximize user retention and drive revenue growth.
- Expert Insights: Gain exclusive knowledge from our Head of Product & Platform, Fabienne Antonin, in a detailed Q&A.
and much more…
These strategies have already enabled Magine Pro clients to achieve increased engagement and subscriber loyalty, and our guide shares the exact tactics you can apply to your own platform.
Explore Our Experience
To see how our solutions can be tailored to meet specific content and audience needs, explore our customer case studies. These examples highlight how other operators have successfully customised their services using our intuitive CMS, and showcase the impact a well-designed UX/UI can have on viewer engagement and retention.
Ready to Elevate Your Streaming Service’s UX/UI?
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to captivate your audience and boost retention rates. Download Behind the Screens: Crafting Immersive UX/UI for Streaming Services now to discover how to transform your streaming platform. For a personalised demo of our platform’s UX/UI capabilities or to explore how we can help, book a meeting with the Magine Pro team today.
Introducing Splatter by Magine Pro
Splatter is the ultimate haven for horror aficionados, offering a curated selection of bone-chilling classics and pulse-pounding contemporary thrillers. In collaboration with Magine Pro, Splatter has harnessed our expertise and comprehensive OTT capabilities to deliver a spine-tingling streaming experience accessible across various platforms including web, iOS, Android, and Chromecast, captivating subscribers not only in Sweden but also aiming to thrill horror fans across Scandinavia.
Delve into our case study to uncover the journey of launching Splatter and gain exclusive insights from its founder, Olle Agebro. Discover how Splatter was born, the diverse demographics of its audience, and the strategic approach to delivering exclusive horror content that sets it apart.
Eager for a glimpse into the macabre world of Splatter? Here’s a sneak peek at the service and what horrors await:
If you want to find out more about Magine Pro’s OTT platform and specialist video streaming services, get in touch! We can help you enhance your existing service or help you launch something entirely new. You can also check out our experience and more of our case studies here.
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OTT: How to increase video content views
Streaming service operators are always striving to boost user engagement within their service and, more specifically, increase video content views. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways operators can leverage their content, service, and even experience to optimise discovery for their users, including maximising their metadata for search and running external marketing and social campaigns.
Optimising the User Interface and Experience
One of the best ways to increase video content views is to optimise the interface and enhance the user experience within the streaming service. If users have a positive experience, they’re more likely to return and recommend it to others.
There are several ways operators can optimise the user interface, including making quality content easy to find. Curating rich categories of entertainment and positioning content high up on the discovery page of the service is one such solution.
Magine Pro-powered streaming services allow operators to curate the discovery page thoroughly, including content category curation and selecting content to hero within the top carousel. Our partners can also use the CMS Console to select what artwork and poster sizes are presented and add engaging and informative titles and descriptions to entice users to choose particular movies or series. Adding additional content, such as trailers and even editorials, will also help expand the discovery experience and give users a clearer idea of what’s available.
Making the Most of Metadata
Another way operators can help to increase content views is to ensure metadata is as SEO-friendly as possible. Metadata is data that defines and describes the data object it is linked to. In this context, metadata describes, via text descriptions, the content of a video, making it readable for search engines.
Ensuring that metadata is SEO-friendly will help content appear much higher in search results both inside and outside a streaming service. To do this, providers should focus on using keywords throughout metadata descriptions, including attention-grabbing and descriptive titles, and adding content summaries that accurately reflect what users will see.
Using the Magine Pro CMS Console, our partners are able to upload, manually edit, and even use custom metadata to help enrich their user experiences and improve search results.
Running External Marketing Campaigns
Service operators can also look to increase discovery and views by running external marketing campaigns focusing on select content instead of the entire streaming service. A strategy like this works particularly well when the chosen content is well-known, sought after, and/or exclusive to the service itself.
Utilising digital channels is a fantastic way to generate interest and track a campaign’s success. Google ads and sponsored social media on audience-relevant platforms are great starting points. And can build out further to partnering with trusted companies or influencers who will promote the content to their loyal audiences and help penetrate new markets.
Magine Pro’s Data Insights toolset gives our partners a clear 360 view of their service’s performance, enabling providers to follow the entire user journey from marketing attribution to engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. Data-led insights like these give operators a complete view of a marketing campaign’s performance and whether focused external content strategies are cost-effective and capable of producing the desired outcome.
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At Magine Pro, we offer a flexible OTT platform that can be customised according to your OTT business needs. Create a video streaming service with us and monetise your live events, linear and VOD content seamlessly through subscription, advertising, and/or transactional business models. What’s more, we have a team of experienced experts on hand who can help you launch and grow your OTT business successfully.
For more guidance on increasing content discovery, views, and engagement, check out our blog. And if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you build and launch a successful OTT business, get in touch with us today.
Finding the UX/UI Sweet Spot: Designing a template for VOD and Live TV services
Today’s viewers can enjoy a wide variety new digital video-on-demand and live TV services on a range of different platforms. At MaginePro, we enable content owners and service providers to effectively engage their viewers by offering a series of customizable UX templates that meet their business needs and user expectations. Our templated solutions are designed to provide the best possible experience for both sides.
In this post, we walk through some aspects of our design systems and cover how finding the ‘sweet spot’ enables us to define the template platform UI to meet our partner’s requirements and user needs.
User Behaviour & Content Discovery
User experience and behaviour differs considerably between linear TV and VOD services.
Linear TV services, for example, are low friction as users get instant access to live content; only needing to interact when actively choosing to change channels. As live TV events have a start and end point it’s crucial that users can find what they want to watch as quickly and as easily as possible. Finding content on a video-on-demand service doesn’t require the same level of urgency, but browsing a big library of content without any context can be overwhelming. Video-on-demand services require more interaction as users need to browse the content catalog in order to find what they want to watch.
At Magine Pro, we focus on building platforms that make it easy for all users to discover content that appeals to them. For example, linear TV service users can catch up on missed live shows such as sports events (when supported by content rights) and create a personal list of their favorite channels, making them easier to locate after signing in. Catch up and VOD content is also presented in modules (movies/genres/series etc), enabling users to interact and explore further details such as trailers, synopsis, and cast etc. This gives the user a deeper understanding of the content and allows them to make an informed decision when selecting something to watch. Curated recommendations on the start page, and recommendations based on previous viewing preferences, also make it easier for new and returning users to discover great content.
Design Approach
At Magine Pro, we frame every design problem in a job story, focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome:
As an example:
“When there’s an interesting live sports event, I want to find it quickly, so I can watch it from start to end.” – Service user
Breaking this down there are three parts we need to consider:
- “When there’s an interesting live sports event” – This is the situation, it describes when this happens.
- “I want to find it quickly” – This revolves around the motivation and why the user wants to do this.
- “So I can watch it from start to end” – Users expected outcome and what we need to focus planning and design around to deliver.
Job stories give us context and enable us to focus more on user motivations. Having a clear picture of user behaviour and needs also prevents us from implementing unnecessary features that reduce the usability of the product. We work closely with our partners to assess the impact and only implement agreed features that don’t add complexity to the template or create friction for the user.
Finding the Sweet Spot
Video-on-demand services enable users to browse and consume a vast content catalog with great discovery features, such as recommendations and related content to boot. Because of this, providers and viewers are drawn more to building and using VOD over linear TV services. At Magine Pro, however, we believe there is a sweet spot nestled between traditional linear TV services and full-scale VOD services. We combine the simple, elegant user interface of traditional linear TV with the power of choice found in VOD, creating a richer experience for users.
Our design approach is focused on creating true value for users and service providers. We leverage our experience and understanding of good UX to build products that successfully fulfill our partner’s needs and provide exceptional experiences for viewers around the world.
You can learn more about Magine Pro’s professional video solutions here. We would love to hear from you if you would like to discuss our products, find out more about our services or get started.