The ambition was to create a flexible, viewer-driven experience. But would it work in the real world? And more importantly, how would viewers actually use it over time?
The Challenge
The BBC was exploring a new concept for broadcasting: a media player that would allow audiences to personalize how they experience a programme.
To refine the design, they needed to understand viewer behaviour beyond first impressions. Our challenge was to uncover how viewers responded, engaged, and formed habits over time.
Our Approach
To capture authentic, time-based engagement, an eight-week longitudinal study was developed timed to coincide with a popular sports season. The research combined in-depth interviews and a diary study with weekly tasks, to capture both evolving patterns and rich qualitative context.
Diaries ran via WhatsApp – chosen as a familiar, low-friction tool that made it easy to share feedback on the go. Each week, viewers told us how, where, and with whom they watched, what they selected, and why. To maintain engagement, our researchers designed varying prompts to build trust and rapport with participants – which led to a high completion rate and more robust data collection overall.
To dig deeper, we ran interviews that focused on first impressions and early behaviors, emerging patterns, as well as the impact on their viewing behaviors.
The Outcomes
We helped the BBC gain a picture of how fans engaged with personalized playback over time – not only what worked, and what didn’t, but why. To aid understanding of the implications of viewing behaviors we tailored our outputs to different levels and functions within the organization.
The insights and recommendations from this work were used to refine the design around real viewer behaviours, and fed into subsequent trials of flexible format viewing.
We work with many media and streaming brands to improve viewer experience. We’d love to discuss how we can help you meet your goals.