The Roku Channel Music
Music video playlists
How do we create a personalized music experience that's in tune to listeners tastes and enables them to discover new music more efficiently? Through user research and consumer insights, we found that The Roku Channel music category was failing to meet customer expectations. Our insights led to more effective organization allowing for better personalization and greater ease and control during music consumption. My team and I was asked to come up with a more efficient way to browse, build the foundation to scale playlists, support top users needs, in order to drive reach and ad revenue.
The Roku Channel is home to 250+ free, curated music video playlists from partners like Stingray, Vevo, and Warner Music Group. Many customers expressed a sub-par listening experience, frustrated with content organization and a confusing continuous playback experience.
Due to constraints in the tooling and infrastructure, and a design that did not support music content in mind, music video playlists were manually curated into a single carousel row. As the music video catalog increased and the number of playlists grew, it required a lot of effort to find a playlist of interest.
To have a shared understanding what customers thought about the current music experience, multiple cross-functional meetings were set up with various stakeholders. We discussed the project outcomes, shared data analytics and user research insights, and uncovered opportunities to address users goals.
From customer insight surveys and user research data, three key themes emerged:
"This is a quote from the participant"
My team encountered a variety of challenges during the course of our project. Here is how I supported them to navigate through these obstacles:
My team investigated various explorations for the music video details screen that considered metadata availability, localization, and scalability. Also for future phases, we evaluated if the layout could be repurposed for tv episodes and short-form content. We closely collaborated with the Design Systems team to ensure our explorations aligned to a common design language and reviewed these layouts with cross-functional partners until all concerns had been discussed.
My team continued to collect feedback through many reviews with UX leadership and user testing. We assembled the agreed direction into a prototype that was circulated across cross-functional teams to discuss any edge cases and last minute concerns.
A/B Test and Release
After months of Product and my team leading nearly a dozen engineers, data scientists, and QA, we were ready to A/B test the designs. The Music playlist and video playback changes was A/B tested and optimized extensively before launching in Sep 2023.
Press
Roku.com - The Roku Channel Music Playlists
Roku Blog - Introducing new Roku features: Sports, Live TV, Photo Streams, and more
User acquisition
Streaming hours
Projected annual revenue
AI generated playlists
Begin enabling AI/ML-generated playlists by Roku to ensure a steady flow of relevant and engaging content
Expand playlists to episodic and short-form content
Evaluate opportunities to support other content use cases such as genre/mood playlists, actor/actress/artists playlists
Explicit user feedback
Introduce opportunities for user input to improve personalization algorithm - Like/Dislike, hide song(s) from playlist mix
