Streaming software and user experience: email engagement

As a User Experience (UX) Designer of streaming software, my job is to design solutions that align with our customers’ needs – But what is UX?

“User experience encompasses all of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services and its products.”

Don Norman (Director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego)

Streaming software development – driven by you

At Public-i user groups, we talk to our customers about their goals. We ask them how they would like to see our streaming software improve?

Recently, clients expressed the desire for more live views of council webcasts. They were looking to extend their reach and to make democratic content more accessible.

Many of our customers promote meetings on their social media pages. We needed to find a better way to inform their viewers too.

Our platform already offered subscription by email – we talked about this here. However, after some internal testing, we realised that it wasn’t easy to use. We double checked the data and realised this small feature could bring huge benefits to our customers.

As a team we sketched ideas, scenarios and stories. We wanted to generate ideas rapidly – as any agile development team should.

Once we had a design with the potential to increase live viewership, we put it to the test.

By conducting a Mechanical Turk experiment we could test the viewers quickly. Furthermore, without causing any disruption to their service. This allowed us to develop a small solution quickly, so our customers wouldn’t need to wait months for a solution.

Real qualifiable engagement – the numbers

After just 4 days we had to shut the test down. We’d seen an 18% increase in email subscriptions, subsequently increasing our total live viewership by an enormous 2% (across all our customers).

With the data collected, we knew improving email subscriptions would help increase council webcast live views.