My team and I designed a solution for usability issues which were common in on-demand video streaming services at the time. Specifically, we compared the usability of both popular and niche streaming services, from Netflix to HBO Max to WOW Presents Plus, researching inclusive design considerations and creating designs for an idealized, all-in-one streaming service focused on usability and inclusivity.
Research on accessibility in streaming revealed numerous pain points for users with conditions like epilepsy, low-English literacy, ADHD, autism, and vision or hearing impairments, who often feel excluded.
Even users without impairments still face challenges due to inconsistent experiences across devices and platforms. Disparate, and often subpar, designs from competing companies fail to match users’ existing mental models, causing confusion and frustration.
Users are in need more accessible streaming solutions. The ideal platform should use a standardized, user-friendly design while addressing often-overlooked issues like dizzying motion, missing trigger warnings, and support for low-English literacy, ADHD, epilepsy, and autism. It should also be intuitive for users of all ages and tech literacy, offering a consistent, equitable, and enjoyable experience across services.
Joy Streaming helps users watch shows and movies from multiple providers in a single personalized and accessibility-optimized platform. Through strategic partnerships, streaming companies can offer subscriptions as “content-unlocking” packages. This all-in-one service unifies design patterns, aligns with users’ mental models, and offers customizable layouts, themes, and enhanced accessibility for often-overlooked audiences.
In addition to considering users of varying tech and streaming literacy, we especially considered users with various disabilities and emphasized equitable functionality when designing user flows and UI.
We focused our initial designs simplifying the user flow for finding a new show, creating multiple paths to encounter new content. As we progressed in fidelity, we started to consider familiarity with existing design patterns while optimizing the UI for those with disabilities or unfamiliarity with the information architecture of a streaming service.
After creating our logo, color palette, and icons, we focused a lot on maintaining a clear hierarchy between font sizes and styles, utilizing specific fonts to draw the users’ eyes to certain places on the page.
We also made sure to include alternative fonts designing to help those with visual disabilities, English-learners, and more as well as customizability for the size and style of text throughout the app.
When presenting our project, we received positive feedback for our idea and had a lot of success demonstrating our ideas. From this, we felt our designs would be well received in testing.
Additionally, our focus on visual hierarchy and browsing functionality was well received in our solution which featured a clear hierarchy, focus states, and visual balance.
For our idea to become a reality at the time of this project, we would need to provide enough value to get buy-in from both streaming services and viewers. To do this, we would encourage growth through content advertising and pushing subscriptions while consolidating the streaming experience and delivering convenience to users.
Since this project, streaming services have already started to go down this route (Hulu, Disney+, etc) and showcase content from other services on their platform.
Looking back, we spent a lot of time researching and brainstorming essential accessibility features and how they need to be presented on various devices for streaming; we thought it was important that any solution which aims to create a prototypical design for streaming should deeply consider the customization and settings options required.
I think the solutions we came up with would be able to help a lot of the people who currently feel left out with contemporary designs. As far as next steps go, pushing for development to complete further testing is just one step of many to make this solution feasible and viable. Not only do we need to ensure our designs are backed with evidence of improved accessibility, but we also need buy-in from streaming services.
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I'd love to help with your next project and I'm always available for a chat. If you have any questions or you'd like to get in touch, feel free to contact me.
