Xfinity Flex Control
Opportunities For Innovation
Acquisitions & Data
Comcast owned technology like WatchWith (Interactive and bonus content) and OneTwoSee (Live Sports Statistics) lacks a consistent platform and valuable data and experiences are being under-utilized
Personalization
Because Comcast (Xfinity) began as a household level service, before the prevalence of mobile devices, delivering a personalized experience has been difficult both from a technology and IA standpoint
Smart Home Market
Customer households with smart devices: 21%
Of those…
1-3 Connected Device: 88%
4+ Connected Devices 12%
Comcast XD Research, Dec. 2018
The Existing Xfinity Household App Landscape
fragmented, unpredicable experiences
🚫
Xfi
"CUT off your kid's Wifi"
🚨
Xfinity Home
"Check Your SAFETY"
💸
XFINITY ACCOUNT
"MoNNEYYYY PLEASE"
A Possible New Life for an Old App
Long neglected, but surprisingly STICKY
One of the oldest apps in the Comcast's lineup was the "Xfinity Remote", designed to control set-top boxes. Historically, this app was an amalgam of two experiences, and when they were combined the disparity in the UX was apparent.
Though long neglected and without a roadmap, we identified this application, and it's 1M+ monthly active users, as a potential starting point and test-bed for experiments.
🥵
NO LONGER MEeTing THE NEEDS OF
ThE ENTERTAINMENT LANDSCAPE
other CONNECTED home &
remote apps WE AUDITED
A New Direction: A Whole-home Experience
THE "FLEX COnTROL" EXPERIENCE
A personalized view of shared devices and services.
Xfinity's partnerships and services provided a unique opportunity to pair devices with content, and through learned behavior provide, a useful dashboard for everyday control. Concentrating especially on the new-to-smart-home user, the concept added the TV, an often overlooked smart device, as a central pillar to a smart-home setup.
▶️ Prototype Screen Cast
Core Components and Architecture
01. FEED
"CONTROL YOUR HOME"
02. DEVICE CONTROL
"CONTROL AN EXPERIENCE"
03. VOICE & D PAD
"CONTROL THE CONTENT"
01. The Feed: A Window into Content and Device Status
DYNAMIC CARDS
Cards within the feed can be resized or reordered dynamically based on the user's location or presence within household, activity, time of day, likelihood of engagement and other learned behaviors. The cards themselves can surface the most important controls for that device, allowing the user "lite control" upon opening the app, and landing on the feed.
Because of the sometimes immediate need to access device controls, a guiding principle was that at any time, a user should be no further than 2 taps away from from pausing, stopping, or lite control of any device.
DEVICE CARDS
02. Device Control: A Platform for Entertainment
DYNAMIC CONTENT & EXTRAS
Comcast had gone through great lengths to build out and acquire technology to provide X1 (cable set top box) users rich on-screen data, sport statistics, and extras. This information however, was often distracting to the actual content as it sought to share screen real estate. The Flex Control provided a secondary platform to reciprocate and build upon these experiences, making for a more rewarding relationship between control and consumption.
03. A Voice-forward Experience
Go Ahead, we're listening
Voice control and navigation on X1 is a powerful and well loved feature. While Comcast had been an early innovator in this space, this functionality had not been ported to a mobile application in a meaningful way. When considering the Flex Control, voice input was at the forefront of our strategy, and the potential benefits of porting the experience to a personalized mobile device were immediately evident.
Unlike the traditional voice control experience, using the app would not interrupt on-screen viewing, lower the stigma against using voice commands in a shared setting. The nature of the devices also allowed easier pivots, and the opportunity for input disambiguation, increasing the likelihood of success. Most importantly, personalized history of past searches gave users a tertiary way to recall and navigate to content or devices, and those queries could even be resurfaced at a later time in the way of personalized suggested activity.
Themes and Principles
Summary
