A streaming platform user persona study
We as UX and Product Designers, are familiar with a User Persona and its importance to any product or service design project. There are all kinds of possibilities when creating a Persona and that’s the fun in it.
What happens when we have a wide audience, with different tastes, behaviors and from different locations? Well, this is where it gets more fun.
Let’s take a look at this User Persona Study of a streaming platform for Latino users living in the US and some countries of Latin America.
Context
Streaming platforms and entertainment services resulted in an increased demand after the COVID-19 pandemic placed more than 1/4th of the world’s population under lockdown for a couple of years. During that time, the video streaming services experienced a rise of around 10% in viewership during the lockdown. Major platforms, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, and Disney+ have registered a spike in viewership worldwide.
In terms of devices, due to the lockdown it wasn’t a surprise to see how the usage of Smart TVs rose up among any other device for this kind of entertainment.
Nowadays we aren’t in lockdown and this usage has turned to mobile devices but still, this consumer behavior remains as more options we have out there to choose as users. There’s products for each taste, free, paid, family-oriented, anime, sports, and the list goes on and on.
First things first: What the h*ll does OTT mean?
OTT stands for “Over The Top” and refers to any streaming service that delivers content over the internet. The service is delivered “over the top” of another platform, and what this means is that the service is a media service offered directly to viewers via the Internet, bypassing cable, broadcast, and satellite television platforms; the types of companies that traditionally act as controllers or distributors of such content.
In the modern era, the cable provider now only provides the internet connection and has no ability to control what you consume.
So, a streaming platform is an OTT service. Having that clarified, let’s enter a little into the business models there is within this industry:
Within the entertainment industry, the most famous business models for streaming products are three: AVOD (Advertisement Video On Demand), which is a free-viewing model, SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand), a paid business model and a Hybrid model, which is a combination of both.
Some product examples are:
You can imagine al the possibilities there are when creating User Personas for this type of products.
Just for a little glimpse, this are the numbers for all the revenue made in the OTT market by 2021:
51.58% comes from advertising video-on-demand (AVOD)
40.16% from subscription video-on-demand (SVOD)
5.1% from pay-per-view, known as transactional video-on-demand (TVOD)
3.16% from Video Downloads (EST)
User Personas: The theory behind them
User personas are fictional characters that represent a group of users that might use your product in a similar way. Personas provide meaningful user archetypes which product teams use to assess their design decisions.
They are extremely useful in improving the user experience of our products as they help uncover the different ways people interact with products, information that can be used to improve the UX for real use cases. Creating user personas can help product teams to:
1. Foster empathy towards users
When a team doesn’t understand and relate to their users, the outcome of the design process will never be effective.
2. Stay away from self-referential design
‘You are not your user’ is a crucial rule in product design.
3. Prioritize product feature requests
User personas help designers shape their strategies for the product. It’s much easier to understand what features will bring the most value to users when you evaluate them based on the persona’s needs.
Well-designed user personas can add the human touch to user research findings. When product teams use user personas, they start to think about a particular person they’re designing for.
How to build a User Persona
Personas are typically created during the second phase of the Design Thinking process, the Define phase. At that time, the team will have enough information about the target audience and can frame it in the form of a user persona.
1. Create user personas based on real data (Data-Driven Persona)
A user persona shouldn’t be based on a whim or a guess; it’s a well-researched summary of data-driven insights about your users:
- Conduct user interviews
- Practice contextual inquiry
- Set up a survey
- Use analytics.
2. Identify user behavioral patterns
Quantitative and qualitative data from user research can serve as the foundation for behavior patterns.
3. Prioritize user personas
Different personas represent different audience segments, but not all of them are equally important. Team should define de Primary persona to focus on.
4. Add personal details, but not too many
While a bit of personality can bring a persona to life, too many details can become distracting.
5. Tie personas to particular scenario(s) of interaction
Try to tell a story of how the persona uses your product.
Following these key steps, you should be able to create a solid User Persona for your product, just make sure to share it with your team, distribute it and have fun!
Creating the User Personas for a Streaming platform, step by step
Let’s get to business.
As soon as I entered this project, I realized that there wasn’t a defined design process nor a solid research to hold on to, and the prototypes were needed ASAP within a tight roadmap. So, while the team explored designs (yes, we were a team of designers), the PM, Design Producer and I looked for a way to set a well-defined design process that would help us organize better and also work in collaboration with the client’s design team as well.
Of course, a proper research phase was part of that process.
To know our users in deep it was necessary to conduct an exploratory research with four key activities that would allowed us to get qualitative behavioral insights and quantitative data to create our User Persona(s), that would be the focus of the design and product decisions for the platform.
First step: Desk research 🤓
Desk research is a research method that involves the use of existing data (material published in reports, surveys, and similar documents that are available in public libraries and on websites), which are collected and summarized to increase the overall effectiveness of the research.
My focus was to home search different sites, articles and statistics useful to our goal:
- General data on Hispanic/Latino population
- General data on salaries and work occupations
- Language insights
- More…
So I prepared my coffee, put some music on Spotify — Spotify algorithm goes crazy with my mixed playlist, and started the fun.
The audience
The project’s wide audience was focused in Hispanic population living in the US and Latin America and the Caribbean. From younger to older people, from single to family households with different tastes, interests and incomes, this study contemplated the analysis of who will be using our streaming services in the end.
To understand the users of our product it was necessary to start by comprehending the basis of their population and culture. How they live, how they behave with this kinds of platforms, how much money they earn, how they manage the english language and how many of they are living in the US at the moment.
For starters, “Hispanic” and “Latino” are pan-ethnic terms meant to describe — and summarize — the population of people living in the U.S. of that ethnic background. In 1976, the U.S. Congress described this specific ethnic group as “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish-speaking countries.
According to Census 2019 data, about a 71% of Hispanics speak a language other than English at home, but they have no problems speaking and understanding English language.
On the other hand, there’s an almost 29% that speaks only English, meaning they doesn’t speak nor understand Spanish at all.
This was relevant to us because of the percentage of people that wouldn’t use our product if we didn’t consider subtitles for Spanish contents.
As for salary earnings and work occupations by Hispanics in the US, a recent report of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that an average salary of an Hispanic person is about $37,024 a year, while a median household income was $55,321 a year.
They tend to be younger and in the prime age working group, 25–54 years old, being the sector with the highest concentration of Hispanic workers the farming, fishing and forestry, followed by building and grounds cleaning, maintenance, construction and extraction, food preparation and serving; and transportation and material moving.
This information allow us to understand their background within the US society, their levels of acquisition power and what professions would our users have.
As for Latin America & the Caribbean region population, Puerto Rico is the Latin American country with the highest average monthly salary, with a net value of around 1,858 U.S. dollars per month.
In continental Latin America, Panama was the economy offering the highest monthly wages, at 774 dollars, and Nicaragua had the lowest monthly salaries, at an average of just 297 dollars.
In terms of age, the median age in Latin America and the Caribbean is 31 to 33 years old.
Second step: Provided reports reading 📖
One necessary action a Product or UX designer needs to take at the beginning of any project is to communicate with the business key actors and ask what information they have that can give the designer a preliminary understanding of what he or she is going to face.
In this case, I asked for any reports or studies they may have from before and resulted in a PDF document of a consultancy agency that did a similar work a couple of years back.
This research report that I was provided, allowed me to understand user behaviors and interests mostly, and gather some interesting user quotes for further research on my own.
Third step: Online survey 🔎
With this tool, the goal was to get quantitative data of a representative amount of respondents, regarding preferences and user behavior around OTT services.
As always, when one is creating a survey, there are some considerations to be done.
To avoid “survey fatigue” an optimal survey should take no more than 10 minutes to respond, however, if needed to take longer, one should try to aboard the questionnaire with easy-to-respond yes-or-no questions.
Along with a teammate, we prepared at list of questions and validate them with Product, to then put together a simple Google forms and send it via social media and specific target groups.
The outcome was very rich to us and allowed us to start knowing their behavior and interest in a quantitative way.
Fourth step: Interviewing users 💬
To obtain the qualitative data we needed, the other front to tackle was 1:1 in-depth interviews.
As the purpose of this tool normally is, we intended to establish a connection with our users by generating a conversational instance, with key questions in which we could deepen each topic discussed.
So, along with a teammate, we sat up to define our objectives, the topics we needed to be responded, iterated on the questions and so on, until we structured a 3-section script that sought to find insights for:
- User’s backgrounds as Latinxs living in the US
- Current experience using Online Streaming Platforms
- Near Future Product Opportunity
That last point was very relevant to us because it gave us insights on what users imagined of an ideal product. One that would meet all their needs.
And relevant concepts like Family, Community and Personalization started to appear. Concepts that we would later turn into ideas and features.
Fifth step: Analyzing the information 🚀
At this point, we had all the material we needed.
We collected quantitative and qualitative information on user behavior with streaming platforms, pains, goals, ideas for a ‘perfect product’, besides types of usage, amount of hours, demographic data and more.
Finally, we put all this information into a Figma file and started our work on User Personas.
User Personas
Because of the characteristics of our product and its Hybrid business model (Free-to-paid), plus the knowledge we had at this point on the possible users, we established 3 main archetypes along with Product:
- Free only archetype
- Free-to-pay archetype
- Paid subscriber archetype
The Free only User Persona
For a free-only viewer live TV is key. They don’t care much about having ads in their shows, because they value aspects like: economy, TV shows, cable TV-like usage and even an emotional aspect.
Watching live shows allows Hispanic viewers to feel like they’re a part of something, a community that they are watching along with — which ties back to the fact that TV viewing is often a communal/collective activity for Hispanic viewers. Considering this, there is also an emotional component to watching TV live that is not so prominent with streaming.
As for the target, besides those who are not capable of paying several streaming services or simply don’t want to, studies have revealed that older viewers (55+) is a growing audience for the AVOD business sector as they tend to use this services as they used cable TV before.
The Free-to-pay User Persona
A free-to-pay viewer possess similar characteristics of the previous segment in terms of the importance of live TV, in this case mostly for News and Sports, and free contents they like.
This viewers are willing to pay the services to subscribe depending on the benefits they will gain by doing it: Access to premium shows, live sports matches, news programs and no ads mainly.
One key aspect of this segment -that is also their main frustration- is that they like to pay only for what they want or have interest in. They doesn’t like to pay for complete packages of channels and contents they wouldn’t see, so they are very selective in their choices of what products to subscribe to.
The Paid Subscriber User Persona
For a paid subscriber variety is key.
They are mostly movies and series lovers. For them, content is the main reason to choose one service from another, or to choose several services at the same time. They tend to watch shows on one streaming platform and then jump to another to see other shows that the previous platform doesn’t have, and vice versa.
They easily can have 3 or more subscriptions for different goals. If they have kids, they surely will have Disney+. If they are fan of specific movies and series they surely will have Prime Video and HBO Max and, on top of everything else, they surely have Netflix as their main streaming service for its variety and Originals.
This segment principal pain is the decision fatigue that implies having so much content to choose, so their frustrations are related to the selection and filtering tasks, thus, an intuitive navigation and a proper algorithm that recommends them interesting contents for them to view.
User Personas in action ⭐️
Sometimes it could happen that User Personas are left behind to dust.
Some companies don’t see the value of this deliverable and some others doesn’t consider them much after they are created. We all know there’s a lot of different contexts and realities out there.
Fortunately, this was not the case here and this pretty girls and boys have been a core document for designing and decision making (Woo-ho! Yay! Hooray!)
From design interactions and components, to user testing insights and future engagement initiatives for the product, our User Personas have been there to participate.
The best example of this is a series of workshops we have been performing so far, with focus on discovering improvement opportunities and creative ideas for the future of the product, applied on a User Journey map linked to a specific or specifics User Personas and their characteristics.
This was a h*ll of a fun ride for us and we sure had a great time researching, collaborating and connecting with our future users, but most of all, was the impact that this represented for the company and the product. At the end, that’s the point of everything, right?
