Amazon Video Channels

In 2015 Amazon Video expanded its service to include third party subscriptions. Customers could now sign up for Showtime and Starz, along with a number of smaller subscription services, directly through Amazon Video. Signing up for a subscription would expand the amount of videos available to them, while still keeping everything in one place.

The initial design reviews for the project were focused on web and Fire TV, with myself leading on the latter. Through the project I worked closely with our creative director and the principal designer who oversaw the cross-platform experience, making sure we kept consistency in our ecosystem. After working with the Fire TV design team so closely on Music I had earned a good amount of trust with the team and was able to create a design spec with less oversight, speeding up the time it took to get sign off on the work from their own project management and design teams.

Home & Menu Updates

Add On Subscriptions would appear as a carousel within the Fire TV Home and Video sections. Each subscription would be represented as a tile, using hero artwork from a key show coupled with the service logo.

Along with these new carousels the Fire TV menu was altered to align more closely with an IA update that was to be applied across the whole of Amazon Video. The Prime Video node was updated to Your Videos, creating an area for any content the customer had rights to playback for (Video Library, Prime Video, and any Add-On Subscriptions they had signed up to). Content available to Rent or Buy was placed inside 'Video Store'.

An additional benefit for this change was reducing the number of video specific menu items from five down to two, decreasing the size of the Fire TV menu and reducing the number of button taps needed to get to other areas on the device, such as the App Store.

Early Concepts - Offers & IA Updates

Offer presentment was where I focused the majority of my time in the early stages of the project. On Fire TV subscribing via Amazon Video was just one option available to users, they could also chose to install relevant applications, which would need to be given equal weighting alongside our new offering.  My initial pass put the offers into the browse list to make it easier to jump between them and give them more equal weighting. Ultimately I moved away from this design due to the reduced space to message our new subscription product, and potential confusion to customers who didn’t know which option to pick and why they were different.

I also explored incorporating a new information architecture update - explicit filtering within the Movies and TV hubs. This was functionality that had been recently added to Amazon Video on web and mobile. These filters relied heavily on the menu button, which was the first first time it had been used as a toggle control.

This ultimately felt too complex for a lean-back device that was intended to be simple and easy to use. The UI also looked like it should be selectable with the d-pad on the remote, which could then cause confusion when the user was further down the carousel list.

Subscription Landing Page

The landing page was a new template for Fire TV, a mini home page within the experience specific to the selected subscription service. I used the Fire TV's own home page as a starting point, it was the best option for surfacing multiple rows of content while using an interaction pattern customers were familiar with. The top slot was given to a call-to-action banner. This would take the customer through to a full screen page advertising the subscription offer and ultimately leading them through the sign-up flow if they decided to continue.

The first screen below shows what an unsubscribed user sees. When subscribed this area is replaced with merchandising for a specific series or movie, shown in the second.

To help the development team and project managers understand the routes to a subscription for an unsubscribed user I created a flowchart to complement the mock ups.

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Detail Pages

The subscription offers added an additional layer of complexity to the detail pages, as the majority already had a number of ways of watching a video. I needed to find a way to add the offers in while making sure customers weren’t overwhelmed by the options available.

For movies and TV shows available through a subscription the subscription offer is shown first, with purchase offers displayed after. This meant customers could still easily watch the content without signing up for the subscription if they didn't see the need for it. For a heavy user it would help showcase the value of the service, creating a comparison point to the monthly subscription fee.

Sign Up & More Ways to Watch

One unique problem for Fire TV was the ability to download apps for the larger subscription services, such as Showtime, through the App Store. We wanted to make sure we surfaced these apps in our own service, so we didn’t lose customer trust by having them accidentally sign up for something through Amazon they were already subscribed to. This meant messaging the availability of these other apps in the ‘More Ways to Watch’ modal and on the sign-up splash pages.

Prime as a Subscription

With the removal of the Prime section in the main menu, Prime was shown as a tile within the subscriptions carousel. Prime Carousels were still surfaced throughout the application, and I used a new tile treatment to highlight the Prime rows, and a blue logo instead of the monochrome one used for other subscription services to help give Prime a special status.