Overview

In Fall 2019, my team participated in Kellogg Design Challenge (KDC). We received a case prompt from the competition sponsor—Amazon Prime Video.

Problem Statement

Prompt

“How could Prime Video become a destination for movie and TV viewers, outside of times when they’re planning watching something? (i.e. what is our 3-minute coffee line experience)”

Problem reframe

What user needs will bring them to Prime video outside of times when they are planning watching something?
We decided to start from this problem statement and perform some user research to find out their needs and pain points.

Process

Primary user research

We conducted interviews with people to collect their opinion on video watching. We also observed people in different setting on how they spend their fragment times throughout the day(i.e. waiting in a line, shopping breaks, lunch breaks etc.).

Secondary researches

We also performed secondary market research to figure out the total addressable market for online video platforms, the potential growth for the business and the long-term strategy that Amazon may have for its Prime Video Service to further enhance the existing video streaming experience.

Findings

We ask ourselves the question: What do people do when they are not watching TV or movies? Apparently, from our findings, social media takes a great part of people’s screen time throughout the day.

Social networking is the key theme that we found during our research. For some users they found it hard to find contents they like, for others they found the need to share what they watched with their friends in an easier way. Thus, we created two personas to outline the needs from different users.

Personas

We found two typical types of users from our research, Jack and Rachael.

Jack, is one typical kind of user who find it hard to explore contents that they like. They are hesitated to try watching new shows and typically stick to one platform that they’ve already subscribed.

Rachael is a group of users who loves watching shows on different platforms. They are active on social media and would love to discuss the show they watched with friends. They think that watching different content is a special bonding experience with their friends. However, they find it hard to share the content with their friends if the friend does not have the access to a particular platform.

Challenge

How to allow someone like Rachael to get a bonding experience while watching while helping someone like Jack who wants an easier way to watch high quality shows? We decide to take the advantage of social media.

Solution

We named our solution as VideoMark. It is a set of features added on Amazon Prime Video to allow users to pick the special moment of the video and share it with their friends.

You can like any moment during watching a show.

Whenever you are using social media apps, you can export the moment you liked directly to your social media account and allow your friends to watch the moment that impressed you.

Your friends can watch a small portion of the video, like 6 minutes, and add to their watch list.

Through this flow of actions, we allowed the video watchers to share their favorite content through social media and allow their friends to watch the show, discuss together and enjoy the bonding experience. In a way, we increased the share-ability of the content and decreased the commitment need for watching content.

Summary

By allowing social networking elements in people’s video watching experience, we break the barrier set by traditional content streaming platform and allow high quality content from Amazon Prime Video to reach more people through social media. We think that by reducing the friction in sharing the content, we allow the prime ecosystem to reach a broader audience, thus create potential membership expansion opportunities for the business. We think this is the way to go to break the barriers set by different content streaming platforms.

However, the team also realized that this is not an easy solution since there are several challenges need to be solved before the product launch. For example, the copyright issue can be a potential setback for the product launch since the content are shared to non-subscribers of Prime Video. Nevertheless, we still think social media created a new opportunity for the content streaming platforms like Prime Video to explore in engaging the users and potential subscribers in the future.

Acknowledgement

Big thanks to the team Hexagon to participate in KDC2019, this was a fantastic experience!