Le Cinéphile is a streaming service with a library consisting of renowned films, animation, and shows from across the world. For the past 2 years Le Cinéphile has been operating as a free service relying solely on ad revenue as a source of income, but now the company is ready to introduce a paid subscription option for their service along with better benefits for premium users.
Before this subscription model is rolled out, however, the company needs to adjust the current UI to both draw attention to the new subscription and allow new and returning users to subscribe to this premium model.
Due to time restrictions, it was important for me that I pick the methods that were most effective and most efficient for the task at hand. I chose to perform a modified and condensed human-centered design approach with a heavy emphasis on usability testing and design iteration because I knew competitive analysis would give me a solid head start on the early iterations for this project and I wanted to focus more of my time on how to adjust the subscription solution specifically for use on Le Cinéphile’s service.
In order to get users to try out the new subscription a 14 day risk free trial was added to the app. The app's premium options were also priced lower than the streaming competition at a mere $5.99 per month to make sure the price would not be a deterrent for our budget friendly users.
Since there are a large variety of media sites out there that could be of use in competitive analysis I split this analysis into three main groups:
I did the most in-depth comparison of the streaming apps of Peacock, YouTube, and Crunchyroll to focus on:
Since streaming services are a common type of app and we already knew quite a bit about our users at Le Cinéphile I decided to use short user surveys to get users’ opinions on what kind of benefits they wanted from a premium subscription and how much they expected a premium streaming service to cost.
Although our company already had a persona for the free version of our app, since the app was changing I decided it was a good time to update our main user persona. This tool not only helped me to keep our users and their needs top of mind as I worked, but also helped me to think about areas of opportunity within the app that could help differentiate Le Cinéphile in the already over saturated field of movie streaming.
In order to help me make sense of all the information I had collected during my user surveys and competitive analysis I decided to visually organize the information I collected in an affinity map. By looking at the information in a visual way I was able to discover what benefits in the subscription model should be prioritized. I also learned what price ranges for our subscription were viable options in the competitive market of video streaming.
In order to get an idea of the basic steps a user would take to watch a movie using a free trial and how they would feel along the course of this journey I decided to make a journey map. This helped me to brainstorm how the subscription flow would ultimately combine with the overall main flow of the app: a user finding and watching a movie. It also helped me discern low points that would occur for a user during this flow and how to minimize these pains within the app.
Although journey mapping gave me a basic idea of how the subscription flow might fit into the larger movie watching flow, I now needed to get a more detailed idea of how this would happen. By figuring out the more detailed steps the user would take in the app before creating the app designs it gave me a basic idea of the structure of the pages I needed to add along with some adjustments that I would need to make to the information architecture to add the subscription flow into the current app.
In order to quickly get my design ideas out of my head and quickly iterate on them I decided to create sketches for the subscription flow I was adding into the app. My main focus was to seamlessly draw attention to the subscription plan for new and returning users in an obvious but not intrusive way.
I chose to make the free trial a no risk trial because it did not collect the user’s credit card information and it automatically expired. I knew that many free trials ask for the payment information up front and renew automatically after the free trial, but I honestly thought this might be turning users off from trying the subscription and that it might feel manipulative to some users and make them distrust the company more. If this was the case, it could affect how many people try the free trial (and ultimately sign up for the subscription) along with the number of returning users (free users, in particular, who would still bring in ad revenue for the company).
In order to save time, I decided to go forward and test my sketch prototypes to get fast feedback rather than taking the time to build interactive wireframes. I decided the amount of time needed to build these wireframes would not bring enough of an improvement in user feedback to warrant the time I would spend building them. In order to save even more time I also tested with 5 users using remote usability tests.
Along with testing the subscription flows I also wanted feedback on the free trial. I used the following questions to come up with the tasks I wanted users to go through during the usability test:
Out of the 4 users who were asked (I added the question after I finished testing the 1st user) all 4 users preferred a free trial that did not require entering their credit card information and automatically expired, so my hypothesis that the free trial that auto-renewed was deterring users from trying the premium service was correct. In order to make the transition from the free trial to the premium subscription easier for the users who wanted it, however, I learned that I needed to add a seamless transition from the end of the free trial to a prompt asking the user to sign-up for the premium subscription.
"For me if I’m budget conscious I just want to try [the free trial] just cause it’s free and then I’ll do the work of putting in my credit card if I actually want to use it” - User 2
"I do not like providing my credit card details… and the additional fear of them collecting my credit card information just turns me off from so many services” - User 4
"I’ve gotten burned too many times [from free trials that auto-renew] and then I have to dig for where to shut it off and so I don’t like giving my credit card information out [for free trials]” - User 3
I chose to make a high fidelity prototype because I wanted to get feedback on the interactions as well as the designs. It takes more time, but interactions can cause a variety of usability problems so I wanted to discover as many usability issues as possible before the design was implemented by the engineering team. In order to save time I again tested with users using remote usability tests and since recruiting went well this round and I had extra time I tested with 7 users instead of 5 to get extra feedback.
Other pain points were discovered during testing, but overall the users thought the flows were intuitive and they did not feel manipulated or pressured into signing up for anything.
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Over the course of my allotted project time I came up with and designed a solution for how to implement a paid subscription seamlessly into the existing app of Le Cinéphile. Although the Le Cinéphile design team will need to do more usability testing before the premium subscription is rolled out (to verify the new changes helped with the usability problems discovered during my usability testing), the fact that 100% of the 7 users were able to complete the main subscription tasks means the current flows are a viable solution to the implementation of a subscription model. I also managed to come up with a solution that met the business goals of helping users to subscribe while still maintaining trust with our users by avoiding trapping them into paying for a subscription they did not want after the free trial. It is after all more cost effective to maintain users' trust than to gain it back.
