Frontier Cable

CABLE'S NOT DEAD YET

Frontier approached Fjord with the goal of innovating their old, legacy software inherited from Verizon and updating the cable experience. Their customers are used to a giant remote with 40+ buttons and a UI that's difficult to navigate, but they're tied to cable because of sports, Live TV, and the DVR. We reimagined what it would be like if Netflix, Hulu and other third-party apps were integrated all into one – we want the Frontier HDMI input to be the only source on a user's TV. We were driven to significantly reduce the number of clicks it takes a user to rent a movie (a big money maker for a cable company like Frontier).

Design Team Shoutouts: Tanya Arendale (VD) Jason Kirtley (VD) 
My Role: Art Director

The typical cable TV experience involved a "boot up" feeling with slow, dated technology and unfriendly messaging. We recommended Frontier surface their movies and TV shows to show engaging, delightful content from the beginning to personalize the experience. The more we can learn about our users from the beginning, the more we can help them find content easily. Sports fan? We can nudge you when the next game is on, or make sure the record settings adjust for you to miss overtime. Do your kids love watching Moana over and over? We can let you know when the movie is on sale so you can purchase it instead of renting it again and again. 

We distributed surveys, conducted in-home observational interviews and interviewed North Dallas cable subscribers. We focused on two main users – the legacy customers who can find their go-to buttons on the remote on the dark and 'couldn't live without' the grid-style view of TV shows, and the millennial streamers who only care about certain shows, are used to Netflix-style swimlanes, and want an easy way to find what they like. We redesigned the Grid and its interactions but also developed a comprehensive search and a new Home screen where recommended, frequently watched and recorded content were surfaced to a user in a more engaging way.

Part of our design strategy involved simplifying the 40+ buttons of the TV remote and focusing on the main directional pad (I'm using an Apple TV remote for demo purposes). We demonstrated browsing through a large amount of TV shows and Movies while keeping the user keeps focused and grounded. The active selection is consistently in the same place on the screen with a peek of the previous show to the left to understand where the start of each "swimlane" is. We also created rules and recommendations around uses for swimlane rows of content (allowing for a large amount of titles in a horizontal row) vs a grid view.