While working at IGN I was part of the team that added new video series pages for our popular web shows as well as adding profiles for our on camera talent. These pages serve as a way for fans to access the latest content from the hosts and shows they love.

Role
Product Designer

Website
www.IGN.com

The problem of discovery

IGN has been producing shows since 2004 but there has never been a real home for them on IGN.com. If a user wanted to go back and watch old episodes they would have to search for them, or sometimes they wouldn’t even realize a video was part of a show. 

Outlining an ecosystem

The first problem we had to solve was given IGN users the right information when they needed it. This meant presenting video content with relevant show and personality details.

Building the viewing experience

After a user was interested in more content about a given show we had to create an experience that catered to discovering other relevant episodes build anticipation for upcoming episodes.

Prototyping designs with live content

Part of our research for this project was to look at our APIs to see what was currently being tagged as shows and determine how to tag personalities.

Presenting the right details

Discovery
When a user is watching a video of content they enjoy we wanted to give them intelligent options to watch more of that content.

Navigation
Once users know what they are interested in how do you allow them to access it with minimal friction. We introduced a new navigation panel for shows to allow users to find their favorite shows with ease.

Cohesive art direction

We explored a variety of art directions and landed on a bold treatment that involved color gradients, shadows, and a primary color given to each show and personality.

Project learnings

Using real data
After viewing that data that would populate our designs we made strategic changes to account for the fact that we make a lot of news videos. Always test your assumptions.

Simplify
It’s easy to make features more complex but it take a lot of effort to distill concepts down into their simplest and most effective form.