GlobalTV.com

I was the User Experience Lead for a complete redesign of the GlobalTV.com web and streaming video experience. The project included designing an entirely new web video user experience for all Shaw Media (now Corus) web properties, which was then launched with the redesign of the digital presence for Shaw Media’s flagship brand – GlobalTV.com.

Global TV is a brand that has a unique place in Canadian culture, reaching 98% of English speaking Canada, and occupying a unique place in Canadian culture for more than 30 years. In addition, this channel (and by extension this site) accounts for a significant portion of the revenues of Shaw Media. Millions of monthly visitors, national advertising coverage, thousands of hours of video served every day – in short, quite a challenging redesign. In addition, the new site had to be fully responsive to adapt to the wide variety of devices that our audience was using to access our content, and be deployed using several existing content management platforms.

As User Experience Lead, I started out working primarily with the main business owner to define what the new web video product could and should be. This included a lot of discussion about a new video experience for GlobalTV.com, and all of Shaw Media’s web video properties.

Then we looked at who the audience of GlobalTV.com actually was and how they thought about us and our existing site, through surveys, analytics and internal user testing (more about this in an upcoming post). We considered the overall vision for the next generation of GlobalTV.com, as well as how to adapt Shaw Media’s Common Platform infrastructure to enable our ideas. Then we engaged the talented internal dev teams at Shaw Media to help us bring it all to life.

After almost exactly a year of hard work designing, building, testing, iterating, and redesigning, we managed to launch the new site and video platform with zero interruption of the user experience. The new site was not only beautiful and highly usable and functional, but would also deliver a significant improvement to the bottom line for Shaw Media. The new video platform delivered over 30% more user views, and over 50% more video plays, resulting in significant business benefit.

UX Design and Project Leadership: Andrew Wardle
Visual Design: Robert Bava

The redesign included a new series of premium show page templates to highlight the air time of the broadcast shows, as well as all of the previous episodes for free viewing online. User could even watch the show live online at air time!

Deluxe video templates make the video the star, with easy access to show details and other episodes.