Discovery+ is a global streaming service within the Warner Bros. Discovery brand. It is available across multiple regions globally and has a large catalogue of content across, movies, tv, and sports. I was tasked to lead the product design of a new feature, Pay Per View. This Feature would allow the business to sell premium sports offerings, such as Boxing, UFC, and WWE events to existing and new users, with, or without subscriptions. The current implementation of this was using a third party, this new feature was introduced to bring Pay Per VIew events into the discovery+ app.
Client
Discovery+, Warner Bros, Discovery
Role
Senior Product Designer
Platforms
TV, Web, Tablet, & Mobile
Year
2023
1. Project Goals
Increase the Discovery+ user base by allowing unsubscribed users to purchase one off pay per view content.
Seamlessly integrate the pay per view purchase flow into the existing Discovery+ product. Including in-app purchases across multiple devices, such as Android and iOS.
Create scalable design patterns and purchase flows which could be used for future use cases within the product, such as, pay per view movies.
Follow Discovery+ design principles and language to create a coherent experience across TV, Web, Tablet and Mobile for our existing user base.
2. Design Process
Exploration and Discovery
The UX research team conducted user surveys and interviews to better understand the problem and help define the requirements. Alongside this the design team and myself started by carrying out a UX audit on the current purchase flow across all platforms, TVs, Web, and Mobile. Once this was complete we started to map out user flows in wireframes to better understand how a one off payment could work with the current subscription flow.
To understand the parameters and possible limitations we held multiple weekly and monthly UX workshops with product managers, legal, tech, and other stakeholders, where I would run through wireframes, user flows, and user stories to help define and guide the designs.
Initial Design Phase
I was responsible for designing the Pay Per View experience across multiple devices, including TV, mobile, Tablet, and web. One of the key challenges here was to create an experience that was cohesive across all devices, although, there were clear device and tech limitations. Limitations between TV devices were also clear with some being able to handle IAPs (in app purchases) and others not. This meant there needed to be a large number of designs for different platforms, while still trying to keep parity across devices.
Purchase Journey
The purchase journey utilised the existing subscription flow to reduce tech effort and add familiarity for existing discovery+ users. This was adapted for one off purchases and IAPs (In App Purchase) was added to Android and Apple devices to ease the purchase flow for users.
Device complexity
Due to the large number of devices supported, purchase flows became ever more complex with different deltas between them. I advocated for consistency where I could in the design but as mentioned device differences and tech limitations meant there were differences between designs.
Clear Touch-Points
A Pay Per View badge was created to highlight premium content throughout the app experience at every touch point. This was also paired with event imagery to aid the use in differentiating one off Pay Per View content from standard content. This needed to be scalable across multi-regions and languages, so local currency symbols were used.
3. Results
Pay Per View was successfully launched on discovery+ premiering with the latest WWE Royal Rumble event. The following event Tommy Fury vs Jake Paul was the highest grossing pay per view event in BT/TNT Sport history and saw record viewership across discovery+. Feedback and surveys were all positive with the feature and the user friction in buying these events seemed minimal from customer service queries, even though the purchase journey was not optimal due to tech and device limitations.
Overall the launch on discovery+ was positive and has been used for all future Pay Per View events. The ability now to advertise and sell single events within the discovery+ app instead of a third party (as was the case before the launch) will save business costs. The secondary benefit of this is widening discovery+’s subscriber acquisition through upsell to a subscription once the user has purchased the single event.
