Mobile UX: Spotlight

The companion to Spotlight on TV, Spotlight on Mobile is designed to get you help you make the most of the time you spend in front of the television. Spotlight differentiates itself from the other TV discovery apps on multiple fronts:
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• Live viewership that helps Spotlight understand what's trending in real-time and surface the hottest content as soon as it trends
• The wisdom of millions of TV viewers that help us find shows fans like you might enjoy next
• The ability to detect what's on the big screen and directly interact with the content on screen and the people watching it

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Building off the research Samba put together to understand how modern viewers choose what to watch on television, we designed Spotlight on mobile with a conscious intent to explain every single recommendation the app makes to the user. Whether it is because a show is trending, premiering, or because it is receiving critical acclaim or you watch certain types of shows during a specific time of the day, we wanted to surface the context that would help the user make their choice confidently.

Because we found out through research that TV watchers trust human recommendations more that algorithmic ones, we consciously introduce human-powered mechanics like Recommend and Lists. In particular, Lists provide a lot more color to recommendations, providing users editorial content to get convinced, as well as connections and recommendations that algorithms couldn't discover on their own.

The app was also designed to accommodate current and new ways of watching television: while we retain the traditional EPG view that people watching live TV are used to, we supercharged it with new features, including the ability to sort channels and surface the ones the user would be more likely to watch at the top; we also gave the EPG the ability to switch to the live feed of the show, or the on-demand version that is usually available as soon as the first live airing begins; and finally, to build on features and usages seen in live platforms like Twitch and Youtube, we built a live chat that allows anybody watching the show to interact live or delayed.