This is an overview of the User Interface of Jio TV, the problems users are facing and my research, thoughts and approach on improving it.

TV has been an important part of our entertainment for decades, now that it’s been operating on the internet makes it more crucial for businesses to provide their rich offering to users in the most pleasurable way possible. I’ll be talking about one such company in India, named “Jio”.

Jio is part of the Reliance group and has a major role in shaping internet consumption in India. Their primary offering was telecommunication services but they also came up with a product called Jio Fibre, where subscribers will get a TV box along with a wifi connection. This may be its approach to deploy entry-level products in the market to capture the media and entertainment in the Television domain as well. Now JioTV has an OS they use to operate their set-top box which the company aims to replace the local cable TV. This also has an advantage to consumers as JioTV works on the same wifi they provide and has included OTT platforms in its packages, helping consumers to manage TV and wifi expenses together at cheaper rates with just a single login for accessing all platforms. You can read more about Jio here.

Disclaimer

All of the observations, critiques, and suggestions are solely based on my user research and personal experience of using JioTV. This review/study is part of my learning and is in no way an attempt to disturb Jio’s online image.

I have attached pictures so that viewers can get a better understanding of the issue. No copyright infringement intended.

Context

The Indian smart TV and OTT market is expected to grow rapidly during the forecast period (2021–2026) says a report by Mordor Intelligence.

Snapshot from Mordor Intelligence report

According to IBEF, the market size of the OTT video streaming market of India is forecasted to reach USD 5 billion by 2023. — Mordor Intelligence

It is also observed that households in India are witnessing a transition from conventional TV sets to smart TV sets. As a result, it looks like a great opportunity for a company to grab this market segment.

Jio has been trying to do the same by capturing the consumers who are currently using local cable tv. This primary means that the Target groups are already used to cable TV and Jio needs to change their behavior to adopt JioTV. For this, they have been trying to achieve a similar experience but lacked a seamless experience. I must say that they did a remarkable job merging the OTT platforms and the cable tv experience which I will cover later in this article.

The Problem

Though the strategy is quite clear the main challenges lie in the interface, new users on this platform are used to broadcast/cable TV and does not know the concept of selecting apps, clicking and moving a cursor on a screen, they expect some channel to appear directly after switching on the TV.

But that's not the case here, either Jio could have included some kind of onboarding for the new users or should have kept the action items very clear. I invited people to use it and made some observations, even my parents feared this new tech, they were afraid that they might press something and things would get worse, it was too complicated for them.

Some users were not aware of how scrolling works in JioTV so even a down button could take them to a different world altogether. These are some of the points I felt critical which made the experience complicated, unpleasant, and frustrating in some cases.

There are too many TV apps on the market that don’t know how to (or consciously choose not to) properly harness white space. The result is cluttered eyesores that actively undermine business objectives. — Pascal Potvin

So let's begin

I started off with understanding their user interface, took pictures of the user flows, did competitive research, understood the pros and cons of other platforms and how are they managing their content, and listed down the issues.
To sum it up, my approach was to:

1. Research
Understand the company’s intent and what are they trying to achieve.

2. Acknowledge what Jio is doing right
Things I liked and pointing out stuff Jio innovated and needs appreciation

3. Identify what Jio is doing wrong
Areas which has a scope of improvements

4. Fix the wrong to achieve results
5. Test your solution.

We’ll be covering the first 3 points in this article in detail as it would make it very long to cover all of them. So allow me to cover it one by one.

1. Research

To understand what Jio was currently doing I noted down the flows, captured screens, and listed down the strength and weaknesses of the competitors in the Indian OTT market space which included Amazon Prime, Disney+Hotstar, SonyLiv, and Voot as big players.

Understanding flows of JioTV AppPart for competitive analysis

For the next step, I tried to understand the customer segment Jio was trying to target, which turned out to be people from 28 to 60 years of age, who are responsible for paying for their entertainment. I made an assumption that the target group would be from a middle-class family based on the pricing which Jio was charging.

Now, there can also be a case that the target customer isn’t always the user as a family typically includes kids and old members as well, keeping this in mind I was aiming for an interface that would be easy to use by everybody. I even tried to observe and made a note of how different aged users interact with the current interface. Here are some insights —

Kids and college students (15–25yrs)

• They were able to navigate quite easily as they referred to mobile analogy and also used voice inputs to search quickly.

Parents (30–65yrs)

• It was hard to learn the new navigation for the first time but they got used to it.
• They expected the remote to work in the same old way as cable tv, they didn’t know we could navigate using arrow buttons.
• Few of them ignored what the buttons meant because the remote looked identical to a cable tv remote and people were habituated to use only limited keys like numbers volume and change channels.

Aged Users (above 65yrs)

• They faced a hard time understanding the interface, the idea of tabs, search, etc is completely new to them.
• These users need a lot of time to get onboard.
• Even after the briefing, people preferred someone in the house to switch on the tv for them, as they felt the interface was too complicated.

My goals for the new interface
🎯 access to live channels to be simplified or resemble cable tv
🎯 switching between channels should be easy
🎯 improving discoverability and UI as per standards
🎯 manage content and avoid repetitive content

2) Things I liked about Jio

To my surprise, I guess Jio tried to address this issue and vouched for easy navigation to solve this problem, they used 4 colored buttons on the remote as shortcuts to move around the OS.

Secondly, they also had a feature for voice search which worked pretty well.

But the challenge here they faced was discoverability. People (including me) were not able to figure out this feature by themselves in the first go.

3) Identify what they did wrong

This is the part where we need to focus on, so they did a few things which didn’t go well and can definitely be improved to enhance the experience.
The general opinion I felt as they were inspired by Apple TV (even the box design) however as the target user is different a more user-centered approach could have helped to avoid issues.

Looped user flows

Let me explain this by taking an example, lets's say you want to watch a movie,
Now you’ll go to Jio App, select a movies window, pick a movie, and expect it to begin when you press the OK button! ….but unfortunately, here it takes you to the OTT platform where you’ll have to find the movie again.