Performance-Driven OTT UX Design
Learn more about OTT UX design at Streaming Media East.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Sam Drury: Designing with performance in mind. Now, no matter how amazing your user interface is, no matter how intuitive it is to discover the content within your application or whatever core features you've got, if the actual product is slow, if it's sluggish, if it stutters, it's going to be rubbish. No one wants to use it, and it's going to be a painful experience for them to use.
Now, what we found is, design teams have a habit of showcasing their designs on a very glossy 4K HDR displays when presenting them to stakeholders, because they look amazing. But, at the end of the day, those very high-spec devices probably only make up a very, very small majority of what your actual end users are going to be using. And in reality they're probably going to be using much lower-spec devices, much older devices, devices with much lower-resolution screens.
What we find is a lot of time gets wasted at the end of the kind of development phase, downscaling animation, simplifying transitions, reducing the amount of content on the screen because we've realized when we deploy to a lower-spec device, it's just not performing as we would want it to be.
So, how do you go about doing this? I think the key here is, from the moment we put the pencil to paper as part of the design process, just keep performance in mind at all times. As painful as it is, spend a lot of time using these really, really underpowered devices. Learn what they do well, learn what they do badly, and learn that in advance, and don't wait to find that out later on in the development process because it's a lot more costly and ineffective to try and fix it later on in the development process. And at all times speak to your development team while you're designing it. And run by animations by them. Say, "Hey, if we do an animation like this, or a transition like this, is it going to look nice? Or is it going to kind of grind to a halt on the lower-end devices?"
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