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We are working on revamping our UI for an on-demand video delivery product on mobile phones. The challenge is that prevalent user connection is still 2G which is very slow (about 40-50 kbps) and we want to keep the page light to be able to load quickly.

Since the page has video content to sell, we also want to keep images/screenshots of videos to grab user attention, but because of the challenge of page load on slow speed, we cannot keep too many images on a single page.

We have about 1000+ videos and still want user to be able to quickly find content without any dependency of search (typing is difficult on mobile phones and a lot of users prefer not to type). We also wish to have the design to feature that we have so much content and also wish at least 80% of visitors will view the whole list of available content.

What is the best proposed option to achieve this?

Our current proposed layout (subpart of a bigger layout which also contains movies and tv shows) looks something like this: enter image description here

Inner Pages: enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here

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    You have 1000+ videos and want 80% of users to see all 1000 videos? Even if you don't expect them to watch all 1000, I still don't understand the business case of requiring 80% of the users to look at a list of 1000 items, regardless of how you categorize them. – JonW♦ Apr 17 '12 at 7:48
  • @JonW The business case here is to target visibility/discoverability of content because the list gets updated and some videos are removed/added/replaced every week. If users can discover videos and the content is actually worthwhile, they are going to consume most of these videos. That is the reason for having the focus on content discoverability than content consumption. The challenge is how we can ensure that content is discoverable with minimal efforts. This is also very important because usage of similar products showed that users normally don't go too deep. – djagatram Apr 17 '12 at 7:55
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If you don't want to include a search option (however I think you should still give them one as an option for those users who are looking for something specific) then you're going to have to categorize the videos.

I suggest the default view is a list of the 'Latest' videos that is constantly updating (including paging options should the user want to browse this list in pages) as well as giving them a menu item of 'Categories' where they can select from a list of whatever categories you choose to go with so they can find more videos that way. Keep the page numbering on the individual category pages too.

This similar approach can be found on (shall we say) 'specialist' mobile video sites that are purely sites for displaying videos.#

mockup

download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups

#Obviously as I am not a visitor of specialist video websites I don't know of any example site links to include for you.

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  • we do plan to have a search option in the footer and keep categories with latest being one of the categories. but since this is wap as against app, the interactions are limited, and we also need to support basic older phone os which do not support advanced scripting or HTML5/CSS3. In addition, as I stated earlier, analytics on our video products has shown us that people normally don't go into categories to look for videos and most people see whats upfront visible. On lowend devices they don't even like scrolling as its painful. Is there anything else that would improve this further? – djagatram Apr 17 '12 at 8:18
  • They don't go into categories, they don't like scrolling, they don't like searching... strewth, your audience is a tricky one to please! Do these basic older phones and users even have the ability to watch videos? – JonW♦ Apr 17 '12 at 8:21
  • They do.. and constitute a big percentage of actual users. I have scratched my head for days to come up with better solution :) – djagatram Apr 17 '12 at 8:24
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    I think you're looking for the impossible, I'm afraid. It sounds like you want a way to present 1000 video thumbnails on one single mobile screen. You will have to chunk them into categories to make it usable. (Not to mention that I'm still confused about how a video on demand site would even function over a 2G network - if the navigation isn't practical due to page load then I can't believe streaming video is even achievable). – JonW♦ Apr 17 '12 at 8:45
  • We stream videos at very low bitrate allowing users to watch videos over 2G with very small buffer time. But we do want to keep page load time minimal so user can get the page quickly. They do not mind waiting a little longer for actual content playback on 2G. I have been constantly challenged by the management to bring in video content discoverability while maintaining all the constraints. Since I couldn't find any solution, thought of asking a bigger group of experts. I guess I was right in the very first place, its an impossible problem and cannot be solved. – djagatram Apr 25 '12 at 9:43

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