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Best Practices for Cross-Platform OTT UX Design

Learn more about OTT UX design at Streaming Media East.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Sam Drury: In this industry, it's not uncommon to be tasked with design for not just one platform but for two, three, four, sometimes five different platforms simultaneously. And if we think about it from a user's perspective, they might well swap between that many devices day to day or week to week depending on their particular circumstances, whether they're commuting to work, whether they're at home watching TV on the couch, or whether they're at work watching a streaming application on their desktop computer.

From their perspective, they want to be able to pick up and go from one device to another and have the same experience from one device to another, and they don't want to have to learn a new way of finding content on one device and then think, "Oh, on the TV I have to do it in a slightly different way." They don't want that unfamiliarity. They need this suite of applications to feel like a really cohesive family.

Having said that, at the same time you've got to be very mindful not to break design conventions for a particular operating system. So don't try and do something on your iOS device because you've done it on an Android or a Roku or something like that and bring in design conventions just for the sake of familiarity, because you'll find yourself in a bit of trouble there.

The way we've kind of solved this problem in the past is to have someone whose sole responsibility is to be a user experience design gatekeeper and their job is to continually compare the UX and the design of all of these different platforms side by side and make sure one design team isn't going off on a slight tangent doing something a bit weird and wonderful 'cause it looks cool, and basically just keeping an eye on things throughout the entire design process and flagging up any issues where all of a sudden, conventions may be being broken or it's drifting off in maybe the wrong direction.

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