UX Design Tips for OTT Registration and Subscription
Learn more about OTT UX design at Streaming Media East.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Sam Drury: Registration, subscription, and account creation are almost certainly going to be the most painful part of your OTT product design. There are so many kinds of areas for people to trip up on, both from a design and development perspective, but also your end users, and examples might be second-screen signup. Are you asking your user to go from a big screen where they're consuming content down to a mobile device or a laptop in order to create an account? Do they understand that concept? It's a very, very common concept, but do they understand it? Do they even know the difference between registration and subscriptions? The idea of creating an account and then having to go somewhere and actually buy a subscription to bolt onto that account. Throw into the mix different pricing tiers, free trials. When does that trial expire? Are they aware of it? What happens when that trial expires?
You can see where the confusion can start to be built up and where we need to be really clear and really good in our understanding of where these potential hazards lie. Throw into the mix the additional complication of asking user to sign in with their network provider.
Coming back to text input with remote controls, if you're trying to input user names, passwords, email addresses with a remote control on your TV, you're going to have some issues there. And then lastly, something that we should all be aware of is obviously the California Privacy Act coming into force and what that entails for registration and the retention of customer details. If you're planning on launching in Europe, the equivalent would be the GDPR rules and regulations that we've had for a couple years now. Lots of stuff to think about there.
In terms of mitigating the risk of all of this stuff, there's a couple of simple things you can do. First of all, don't leave it till the end. Very often we see our registration where we'll start thinking about that once we've got the nice glossy out of the way. Don't do that. Have it on people's minds right from the very start. If you have legal teams that need to get involved in this, get them involved from day one, because they're going to want to pore over every sentence, every word, every period. And again, that is not something you want to be leaving a week before you're about to launch, because they're going to want a long time to go over the legal copy that's regarding all of this stuff. Know about the California Privacy Act. Know about GDPR inside out because otherwise you'll get caught out. And again, just read up on it as early as you possibly can.
And then lastly, here are some other things you can do to smooth the process from an end user's perspective. For example, if you're creating an account on a big-screen TV, and we're asking you to sign in on the web, how can we make that transition a bit smoother? Can you just collect a telephone number off them and SMS a link to their phone so they don't have to type in the URL what's presented on the screen. Little things like that can make that experience a bit nicer for the user.
And then lastly, if the user does get stuck, do you provide adequate support and documentation so they can figure out what's gone wrong, or so they can understand all the weird and wonderful ways that you're encouraging them to create accounts? And can they read about it in plain and concise English? This is what you need to do.
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