I product managed and led the release of a new accessible audio and video player embed to market, helping democratize and make online time-based media it more accessible and engaging.
Note: To comply with my non-disclosure agreement (NDA), I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information presented in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of 3Play Media.
Company
3Play Media
Timeline
21+ months (Q4 ‘20 – Present)
Platforms
Desktop + Mobile Web
My Role
Product Manager, Design Lead
Key Collaborators: I worked alongside three developers, a QA lead, and had intermittent support from my Head of Product and VP of Engineering.
Note: You’re currently reading the complete case study, including all of the work I did as a product manager on the project. Just a warning that this is LONG.
A special thanks to my team for their assistance on this project. This is one of the most impactful projects I’ve worked on in my career, and I’m grateful for such awesome and collaborative team members.
Media consumption is interwoven into every facet of our lives such that many take it for granted. Whether you want to learn a new language, fix your leaking toilet, or pass some time by watching funny cat videos, many turn to online video to learn new skills or entertain themselves.
However, for many people with disabilities, online time-based media content is gated by the inconsistent and inadequate support from key audio and video players on the web, which are ill-equipped to support basic accessibility needs that conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
How do we make online multimedia content more accessible and equitable to marginalized populations and individuals with disabilities that otherwise would not have access?
For this project, I formally assumed the roles of both product manager and design lead.
Why? Although I am most comfortable in my role as a designer, I saw this project as an opportunity to take ownership and gain more exposure to the world product management, as I felt these were skills that would be helpful to develop regardless of my role in the organization.
Throughout the project, I was responsible for driving all research activities, prioritizing feature roadmap, coordinating development efforts, and coming up with designs for the NextGen Access Player.
Although not an ideal arrangement, the prolonged timeframe of the project allowed me to front-load a significant portion of the product management and research activities ahead of the design phase. This, paired with my budding knowledge in the accessibility space, helped me gain a deeper understanding of how to design a fully-accessible product that would find a great product-market fit within the online multimedia space.
(aka, what I was doing for almost two years)
I created a research plan, which included discovery through formative user interviews and a comprehensive survey to uncover 144 user needs and inform future product feature set. This research also included a comprehensive market sizing model and helped inform initial pricing and packaging, and customer willingness-to-pay.
Once the team had full confidence in the design, packaging, and go-to-market strategy, we hired an external contracting firm to help support development efforts. I spearheaded a variety of product launch activities, including product management, coordination of internal stakeholder and business function readiness, demand generation, corporate communications, and sales enablement training, among many others.
I worked with my team to complete a competitive analysis in the accessibility player market to identify issues and gaps with existing technologies.
With support from other members of the product team, I led design and testing on two complementary interfaces for the player. As we got closer to high-fidelity, development-ready designs, we continued to validate and test our initial hypotheses and concepts with customers to refine the MVP.
I worked with my team to complete a competitive analysis in the accessibility player market to identify issues and gaps with existing technologies.
With support from other members of the product team, I led design and testing on two complementary interfaces for the plugin. As we got closer to high-fidelity, development-ready designs, we continued to validate and test our initial hypotheses and concepts with customers to refine the MVP.
I created a research plan, which included discovery through formative user interviews and a comprehensive survey to uncover 144 user needs and inform future product feature set. This research also included a comprehensive market sizing model and helped inform initial pricing and packaging, and customer willingness-to-pay.
Once the team had full confidence in the design, packaging, and go-to-market strategy, we hired an external contracting firm to help support development efforts. I spearheaded a variety of product launch activities, including product management, coordination of internal stakeholder and business function readiness, demand generation, corporate communications, and sales enablement training, among many others.
One of our primary goals with the launch of a new player experience was to more deeply understand the feedback we were hearing from our existing customer base and in market around what customers were expecting from online multimedia publishing and user engagement.
I worked with my team to create a targeted procotol to conduct 24 formative interviews with representatives from our customer base.
An open-ended interview structure helped us learn more about the following areas, while affording us new topics to explore:
Over the course of these 24 staggered interviews, we identified 144 unique needs, affinitized into primary, secondary, and tertiary themes,
The goal of the survey was to help us define a solution and quantify the takeaways from the interviews we conducted. Additionally, the survey informed us on an optimal pricing and packaging structure, and mapped the willingness-to-pay of certain customer groups to a bundled set of features that fit the needs of our customers.
Survey results were as follows:
Customers were willing to pay for a product like this
Most customers that found value included customers in education, corporate, and entertainment industries
Responsiveness, accessibility, and compliance were table stakes; customization and metrics were differentiators
Furthermore, the survey allowed us to construct detailed customer personas through a quantitative segmentation analysis. We had rich quantitative data that we validated with the findings uncovered in our qualitative research, creating the following 7 customer personas and 2 end-user personas.
With these personas and needs in hand, I helped facilitate a workshop using the JTBD framework to create individual “jobs” and plot them on two different 2x2 Confidence and Impact matrices for customers and end-users to help inform prioritization of key customer and user needs. Each of the five stakeholders attending the workshop played the role of a separate persona.
In addition to informing us about different customer and end-user personas, the survey also gave us access to some great pricing and packaging data that helped us build positioning templates to drive our concept testing. We used the Van Westendorp pricing framework to arrive at an acceptance range of price points for each bucket of customer usage.
I constructed a market sizing model to validate the market size and total market opportunity, and worked with our Head of Product to finalize forecasting and scenario planning scenarios to get buy-in from our Board of Directors before moving further on this project.
With the knowledge and data we collected over the past year, our team had full confidence in the market opportunity in front of us. This allowed us to kick off the formal design phase, with me taking lead on creating initial design concepts to test with our customers and end-users.
At the beginning of 2021, I started studying for two certifications offered by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). Passing both of these exams helped me conduct research with accessibility etiquette and best practices in mind, and also informed me on how to design for individuals with disabilities and requiring assistive technologies such as screenreaders.
One of the first steps associated with our design process was creating a user journey map. This following journey allowed us to take an audit of the current process, and include future user actions, accessibility pain points, corresponding back-end requirements, and also helped us highlight points where there could be variations based on individual personas.
We came up with some initial design concepts, starting with mobile first, as we had received a lot of feedback around responsiveness issues with our current solution.
Low Fidelity Wireframes for the New Player Experience
High Fidelity Wireframes for the new Player Experience
As we started design on the admin-version of the player builder, a round of interviews was conducted with five customers and two end users. The goal was to collect feedback on six potential features that were assessed as high risk (high potential impact with lower confidence) to understand practical use cases and inform direction for the product roadmap.
Feedback and insights helped us make a round of revisions to the prototype, while moving it from low-fidelity to high-fidelity to start development quicker.
In parallel, I also drove testing activities with our customers to create a set of designs for player configuration. Although multiple variants were explored and tested, we found that the left-hand panel for configuring settings was the optimal placement as many users had seen this pattern in other visual drag-and-drop website builders.
After finalizing designs in March, I had to work with my team to plan our roadmap for Q2 of 2022, as we had limited development resources to build out the player.
Later in 2022, we are planning on releasing the first version of the new player experience in a closed beta capacity, and are currently testing with customers to capture feedback and prioritize remaining features based on market reaction.
Credits and thanks:
Photos from Unsplash. Icons from Flaticon.
Thanks for checking out my work. If you have questions or want to get in touch with me, please reach out by email or connect with me on LinkedIn!
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