It’s been a couple of months since the death of Kangaroo, so we took some time to have an internal debrief on process and project development. Here's what we found...
A successful user experience is when all components of a product and brand work together in harmony, reflecting users mental models, helping them to achieve their goals and simultaneously those of the business.
More often than not, sites that offer poor user experience, represent a lack of communication within the business, with blurry understanding of business objectives and deficiency in knowledge about their users.
In short, the user experience of a product is often the mirror through which a company can view itself, warts and all. So, what did Project Kangaroo see when it held up the mirror?
The Kangaroo case study is a uniquely troublesome one. Any project that has an arbitrarily enforced ‘pause’ in its development, is going to be difficult to keep fresh and relevant, particularly in a rapidly changing environment such as VoD. One of the biggest challenges working on the design and architecture of on Kangaroo, was that it was already developing legacy issues before it had even launched.
Naturally, in a developing market startup, full of talented passionate people, there was a palpable sense of frustration about not having a live product to learn from and build on. This frustration manifested itself into a roadmap where the emphasis was focussed on a drive for new features and functionality, with no real desire or context to revisit any previously completed bodies of work.
This isn’t usually a problem in the lifecycle of a normal project. -When the basic product launches, it quickly becomes apparent that many of the assumptions made about users behaviour were inaccurate, offering opportunities in the context of newly developed functionality. In the case of Kangaroo, we hadn’t had the opportunity to consolidate the core product in light of user feedback.
Without a live product to learn from, it is important to get something in front of users as regularly as possible, while ensuring that as many of the team as possible get the opportunity to watch this happen. This was achieved in the form of rapid iterative prototype testing on any new pieces of functionality.
In the last few months of the project, this inclusive multidisciplinary approach to UX combined with a transition to Agile, resulted in good communication and a real exploitation of the creativeness within the various teams. There was also a shift within the business, inspired by a visible beta site and the reality of launch, to review some of the existing design and IA and consolidate the product. We were really beginning to see the results of these processes.
On the day the Competition Commission ruling was announced, we were in Reading about to start a day of testing on the live site. Not really knowing what to do, we decided to see how the site stood up against the two perceived industry leaders in VOD, iPlayer and HULU. We encouraged users to spend 10 minutes on each one and let us have their thoughts. The response was eight of the ten users reporting that Kangaroo would be their preferred provider for a variety of reasons:
- Scope of content offered
- Ease of location & playback
- Well crafted page design that allows key tasks to be performed with great ease
