Spideo Explore

The context

Spideo creates personnalized recommendation solutions for video streaming services, providing users with relevant suggestions based on their profile, social graph or viewing habits, as well as curated thematic recommendations according to specific topics or atmospheres.

The issue to solve

Explore is Spideo’s analytics dashboard. It allows content editors to visualize catalog data, monitor specific performance metrics, detect trends and provide a global view of frequently watched content.

Explore started its life as a tool created for data analysts, featuring a rather nerdy approach to interface elements and language. Spideo quickly realized this target was not relevant, and initiated an evolution towards a wider audience of marketing and editorial managers. The intended goal was to make Explore more approachable through its information architecture and language, by ensuring the words used throughout the tools meet this new audience.

To put it in the words of Spideo's Product Designer Farah Kraled :

"Data for noobs."

Phase 1 : auditing the content

Explore’s user interface is pretty standard for a dashboard : it provides a series of boards featuring tables and graphs based on a streaming service’s data.

One might think there’s not much text to review on such a tool. There is in fact A LOT of it. User interfaces are mostly made of words : each field, board description, title, every information hidden behind pop-up menus has to be accounted for and reviewed.

For this task I used 4 criteria :

• Clarity : Can the user basically understand what’s behind every word ? Does it meet their expectations ?
• Relevance : Is the language and tone used adequate for the target audience ?
• Correctness : is the language grammatically and stylistically correct ? As french is not the team’s native language, it is important to provide feedback and expertise here.
• Complexity : can the user easily understand what they can do with any given piece of data ?

For each word or phrase encountered across the service, I used a 3 star rating, and compiled the results in a spreadsheet. (yes, it’s big). In the last column, I provided quick fixes I could then sum up in my final document, as I was obviously not going to have the team go through the whole spreadsheet to find them.

Harmonizing titles and descriptions

This first phase revealed a few areas of improvements, starting right at the top of each page. All boards were introduced by a title and a short description that could use a little more coherence. One obvious shortcoming was the repetition of the word « board » on each title, a redundancy as we’re on a dashboard : boards are really what we expect to see here.

Explain and clarify

Explore is transitioning from a nerdy data analysis tool to an interface meant to be handled by marketing and editorial teams. In addition to the wider and less « techy » target, the issue of experience in the field raises itself.

The tool can be used by seasoned marketing managers as well as students or interns, and it is crucial not to overwhelm them with jargon, or at least provide instantly discoverable ways to get additional information.

One simple way to provide such data is by using tooltips with a little « i » icon : that is something Google Analytics uses extensively. Take the « Interactions Distribution » board : you might get the idea of what it is about. Yet, on the user testing session conducted for this audit, most users were on the fence about its meaning, and looked for the tooltip to get more information, which wasn’t there in the early version.

Make it sound native

Developing an english language service is not an easy task for a non native speaker, especially when your native language is French, known to be much more convoluted than English. You have to wipe the slate clean from that baggage and use the english language's biggest strenght : you can express more things with less words (Ironically, the french version of the page you're reading actually uses less words, but that's because I love the language so much I can't stop ! :) ).

My job here was to leverage my knowledge of the english language to make some sentences punchier and more dynamic, mostly descriptions.

Phase 2 : User testing

Spideo wanted to have Explore tested on relevant users according to its new inteded marketing target. The pool of users could preferably come from a TV and streaming industry background, however I tried to think a bit outside of that box.

I settled on users in fields such as web content management or software publishing in order to find profiles who were familiar with the type of tool but not necessarily the entertainment industry jargon. In the end, two users out of four were working in video production or public relations for popular streaming services.

A user testing session consists in getting the users to go through a script that should ideally reveal their pain points and the way they get hold of the product, with occasionally surprising results. I wrote my script focusing on 3 aspects of the product :

• Understanding of specific interface elements
• Navigation across the tool
• Data manipulation

We were not starting with a blank sheet here : as I conducted this content audit, Farah Kraled and her team had already performed significant UX work.

Additionally, the session was conducted on a revised version of the tool, already including the suggestions I made in phase 1, so I was really not expecting to see users puzzled about the Explore interface. We used the session as a way to validate the relevance of our choices.

Generally speaking, there was no big surprise or pain point revealed through the session, and most users made it through the script without much hesitation. Therefore I will keep it short, which is something I try to do in delivrables : start with the "TLDR" ;)

By conducting user testing at an earlier stage, you might of course encounter vastly different results, and that’s what makes user testing so important.