Kayo - Driving Engagement Through Personalisation
Kayo is Australia's largest sports streaming service, previously owned by Fox Sports was recently acquired by DAZN
Role
Senior Experience Design Consultant @ Thoughtworks
Client
Kayo (Owned by DAZN)
Project Length
4 Months
🔒 NDA
This project has not yet gone to market, final and high fidelity designs will not shown. The focus will be in strategic work.
The problem
In an era where personalised content drives engagement. Kayo users were unable to easily set up their preferences due to the cumbersome nature of TV interactions.
If users did take the time to set up these preferences, there was not indication that these meaningfully improved their experience with the platform.
The opportunity
Create a personalisation experience designed for TV's unique constraints, helping users discover relevant content and stay engaged.
My scope:
I joined Kayo as part of Thoughtworks during the acquisition by DAZN. We joined the team as design support. Prior to my joining Kayo had recently undergone a dramatic redesign for mobile, and they needed more help to create and polish design assets and rollout a similar brand update for both TV and web.
Many of the journeys and processes suitable for mobile are not applicible or need significant work to make them ready for TV. I also worked with their internal team of designers to workshop future TV only features.
Strategy and Approach
Competitor Analysis
All competitors (Which included; Apple TV, Disney+, Hulu, Stan, Netflix, Amazon Prime) more than half of the current market use some form of preference tracking in their onboarding process to enhance their customer experience leading changes on their home page from suggestions of individual content to suggestions of broader categories. Of the competitors who embed personalisation into the onboarding only 1 allows users to skip, and they all allow these preferences to be selected in under 10 remote clicks.
User Patterns
Kayo experience a high level of seasonal churn, many of their users are interested in a few sports when those sports are not being played many deactivate their account until the season starts. When users do return they often sign up or reactive their accounts as the first game they want to see is starting, and so onboarding processes are often ignored or skipped in favour of getting to the game on time, and is a large contributing factor to why users don't select favourites.
Omnichannel Approach
Prior to my joining Kayo they had recently overhauled their mobile app experience with a brand refresh and significant changes to journeys and features, This also included a new approach to favouriting for the mobile app.
The TV experience has limitations in progressing through the journey at speed. I wanted to leverage the existing process and features of the mobile designs to give the users a much faster experience setting up their favourites. across all instances of their account.
The Impact of Personalisation on the Home Page
Spending the time to add your favourites to the home should impact the experience a user has throughout the lifetime of their use. Kayo has a personalisation engine churning away behind the scene, but when you view your home page its difficult to see the outcome of this, as it simply suggests content with drawing attention to it. Personalisation of content is now a major driver or engagement of streaming platforms, and spending the time and effort to put in your favourites should reward you with a viewing experience tailored to you. I wanted to ad a favourites carousel to the home page where new content pertaining to your favourites sits. This carousel would also act as a way to select favourites quickly and easily if that user decided to skip that step by populating the carousel options with sports and teams they have a history of viewing.
Testing
We used a third party to conduct user testing for the team across a wide range of features. For the favourites and onboarding I received overwhelming positive feedback on the TV to mobile favourite selection allowing user to very quickly choose a favourite and to then get to their content. For the test users also had to use the TV version to complete task, the longest it took was 3 minutes this is down from an average of 5 in the current version.
Home page personalisation was a harder one to test but also received a lot of positive feedback, users like that it was very easy to find information about the teams they liked, it was less popular for users who were less into a specific team and more into a sport. It has strong applications for team heavy sports like AFL and weaker results in for sports with individual competitors like Golf.
Impact and results
In consulting you rarely stay with a clients long enough to see the impact of your designs with real world data, and this is true in the case of Kayo. When I left the project in late August, they had not yet started development. The changes I designed for onboarding were very positively receive by our testing audience and reduced the time to select a single favourite by 40%.
While I'm not there to see the data as it comes in, if I was i'd look for success in these features by looking and the % change of users who select at least 1 favourite, how long it take them to select it, and compare the engagement between those who do and do not select a favourite through a comparison of hours watched.