Plejmo

Background

In my role as an interaction designer at the movie streaming challenger Plejmo, I had the chance to present our users with a service that always tried to provide something extra. We were a small team of five people in total, so I helped tackle a few different roles: front-end developer, product owner and interaction designer.

Evaluating NPS data and feedback collected by customer service helped us identify and address major pain points in our service.

This here is not a case study, but a collection of examples of the challenges and solutions we faced during my time at Plejmo. The examples presented here were based on my ideas, but all implementations were always created as a team effort.

Svenskt tal tillgängligt (Swedish audio available)

A lot of movies were available in several languages and some were only available as dubbed. Even though the information about audio tracks was present on each movie page, customer service did get quite a lot of inquiries regarding which languages were available, or worse - they had purchased a movie which they later discovered didn't have the expected language available. Naturally, we didn't want disgruntled customers who accidentally bought the wrong movie.

To combat this we put some extra information in the quick facts at the top of the movie page:

If the movie had a language that did not match the language of the movie's origin language, i.e. as presumed, we added: "[language] audio". For example - if there were a French movie with only English audio we would put "English audio" in the quick facts.
If the movie had several audio tracks available, we checked those against the current chosen language of the website (the website was available in five different languages) and if there were a match we added: "[language] audio available".
So if you had selected Swedish as the language of the website and Swedish was available among other languages, we put "Swedish audio available".

This helped us with a set of concerns:

We reduced the risk of customers buying a movie they assumed had a different language available than what it had.
By using the word "available" we could tell the user that audio in their language was available without risking them thinking this was the only language available.
Other movie streaming platforms separate each available language into separate movie assets. So if you want your movie available in both English and Swedish you have to rent or buy it twice. By highlighting that a language was "available" we hinted that the languages were selectable post-purchase.

A scary movie with a scary trailer

On the website, we had trailers available for most of our around 5000 movies. One day we got a letter from Granskningsnämnden för Radio och TV (the Swedish Broadcasting Commission) saying that some of the trailers on our website weren't appropriate for everybody and had to be made unaccessible to younger audiences.
To avoid removing any trailers we had to think of a more creative solution.
We also didn't want to manually go through all old and new trailers deciding which should be freely available and which shouldn't. We didn't even receive any guidelines as to which trailers were ok and which weren't, it was on a case by case evaluation basis according to Granskningsnämnden.

Our solution was to automatically set all trailers for movies with an age rating of 15 years (or equivalent) to only be viewable when the user was logged in. Since our terms and services stated that you had to be 16 years of age to sign up for the service, that meant it would meet the requirements from Granskningsnämnden.

Scary trailer flow

We wanted to make the trailers that require authorization to be as smooth as possible for the users to access. What we did was:

Keep the trailer icon and shortcut in the same place as the unrestricted ones, but reduce the opacity and add the words "Requires login".
When the user clicks the trailer icon they are taken to the login page. On the login page, there was also a shortcut to sign up for those that didn't have an account.
When the user signs in they are taken back to the page they were previously on, and the trailer starts playing in a popup window.
This means that if the user had their sign-in credentials saved in the browser it would only cause one additional click to start playing the trailer.

Throughout the website, we had shortcuts to movies in the form of small movie cards with basic info like title, user rating, main genre and availability/price.

Rent and buy had three different possible states for each movie respectively:

Not available
Upcoming at a future date
Available to be rented/bought

Presenting the user with current availability.

Before the change that I'm detailing here, the user had to click through to the movie detail page to see all available options.
So, for example:

If the movie was available to buy but not rent, it would only state the (higher) buy price on the movie card, and no information regarding renting
If the movie wasn't available, but upcoming, you wouldn't see the dates, and they were almost always different for renting and buying
If a movie was available for both renting and buying, you would only see the lowest price (usually the price for renting, but not always)

Our solution was to divide the information on the cards into two elements, one for renting and one for buying. Not available, or upcoming without a known date, was represented by a dash (-). If it had a known date for availability you saw the date and if it was already available you saw the price.
After the change, our users had a better overview of the availability for each movie, and customer service saw a decrease in tickets enquiring about when and if a movie would become available.