Yahoo! Entertainment

Top 10 App for the original iPad launch event

Project Overview

Apple approached the Yahoo! Native Apps Team with an opportunity to develop an app for the original iPad launch event. We were given early access to an iPad and 6 weeks to design and develop and app for this new category of device.

My Contributions

Visual | UI/UX
‍My primary role for this project was the direction, UX, and visual design of the home screen experience. I worked with 3 other designers who we're responsible for the TV Guide, News, and Video sections. I also created the launch website and demo video.

"Go Wide" Explorations

There was no direction from Apple on what category of app to create. This gave the team an open invitation to explore ways of leveraging the additional screen real estate the iPad had to offer. While Yahoo! has abundant data around weather, finance, sports, etc. we settled on a TV Guide app as the most achievable concept given our tight 6 week timeline.

The App

The Yahoo! Entertainment App had 3 main sections: TV Guide, Videos, and News. Our team of 4 designers each took a section, and I was responsible for the home screen. Skeuomorphism was at its peak during this time, and there was no precedence for how users would interact with this new category of device. We knew that we wanted to build something different than just a large version of an iPhone app. I took full advantage of this blank canvas to employ my 3D and photoshop skills and create the living room home page.

Designed & Delivered

There were a few requirements that drove the overall layout of the living room home screen:
‍

The app should work in both portrait and landscape orientation.
Favoriting a genre in the TV Guide would introduce a clickable object onto the floor of the room.
X-ray view that shows interactive objects and sections of the app they link to (press "?" in bottom left corner).
Ability to customize the appearance of the living room (more on that below)

In order to meet the requirements, we would add/remove furniture to the living room based on orientation. To simplify the logic, I decided to fix the location of the genre objects to an area where they wouldn't move much based on orientation. This would limit the number of genre shortcuts.

Results & Lessons Learned

Many late nights and hard work from our talented team resulted in the Yahoo! Entertainment app being part of the Apple iPad unveiling event. It was one of the top 10 downloads in the App Store for the first couple of weeks after the iPad launch. It eventually fell in popularity as other news apps came online.

There was a known issue that the TV Guide could not change the channel on your TV. While we had a version of the app that feature working, setup was a real challenge without a partnership with multiple cable providers. The app was not enough of a revenue driver to pursue these partnerships, and we ultimately decided not to ship the channel change feature due to the poor setup experience.

Reuse existing content whenever possible

Our team was responsible for maintaining tiles in the TV guide, resulting in a few hours of work each week to keep it up to date. I learned that its best to leverage existing content (including size and aspect ratio) whenever possible. And if custom content is required, make sure there are resources available to support that effort going forward.

Got Ads?

Since the app didn't generate Ad revenue for Yahoo! it was sunset a year or so after launch. I learned the importance of having a long term value proposition for the company and capture that as part of the project definition.

Next Steps

Thanks for making it this far. If you have any feedback or questions about this case study, please send me a note. If you'd like to learn more about my experiences, check out another case study below.