Empowering customers to customize their content structure with a self-service tool

tl;dr

🚩 Problem:

Zype customers were frustrated by the lack of video organization flexibility, wanting nested folders like “Seasons” within “Genre.” This limitation hurt the user experience across TV and web apps, driving frequent support requests and confusion.

🧪 Solution:

A self-service video hierarchy tool Zype users can create and edit without any handholding from customer service.

🥇 Results:

Customer Support calls and dev requests dropped from ~20 per week to 0, with new inquiries focused on feature requests. Accelerated client app releases by ~25%.

👀 My behavior:

  • balanced designing new software, marketing assets and client apps, while managing our client app backlog and app developers

  • partnered with Customer Success to identify pain points

  • conducted a competitive audit to inform design exploration

  • collaborated cross-functionally to navigate trade-offs and align on direction

  • led customer interviews and prototype testing

  • prioritized must-have vs. follow-up features based on customer insight

  • used qualitative feedback and internal feedback to refine our MVP approach

  • tracked impact by monitoring Customer Support insights and our app release timelines

I started as Zype’s sole designer, improving website conversion and product UX. Over the years, I expanded to lead design across marketing, new products, and subscriber apps while also managing app developers, client app builds, and customer service and sales requests.

01 Defining the problem

Through close collaboration with the Customer Success team, we discovered that clients were becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of flexibility in organizing their videos. Zype users were unable to create a content hierarchy, forcing them to rely on standalone folders or playlists. For instance, a “Drama” playlist offered no way to nest sub-playlists like “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “Game of Thrones” beneath it.

I conducted a scrappy comparative and competitive audit to determine how other like-companies handled this and identified common design patterns that would help in our ideation phase.

“The platform just hasn’t caught up with the structure I need for my apps. It’s nice your internal team will manually help me, but this becomes unsustainable when we need to consistently add new videos or make edits.”

02 Ideating design direction

Ensuring clients could easily create and edit a clear content hierarchy (e.g., Genre > Series > Season > Episodes) across TV, web, and mobile apps was crucial. I quickly sketched ideas and collaborated with teammates, using visual representation as the lever to push design exploration in different directions.

In a decision-making session with dev, CX, and product teams, we weighed trade-offs to refine our approach. While 'Option 3 – Simulating a client's app in the wild' was useful, we agreed it was better suited for a later stage in their journey to review before publishing to an app. 'Option 2 – A bird's-eye view of the entire structure' was unanimously chosen for its flexibility in quickly understanding and editing the hierarchy.

03 Converging on designs

The biggest challenge was ensuring the solution wouldn't become cumbersome when managing hundreds of playlists in a single view. I led 4 customers through task scenario testing with a prototype to understand how they would start and continue using it, and to identify the must-have features.

We gathered insights that informed our MVP and follow-up features.

First, we separated the ability to add playlists and videos, which were originally under one button. Users often preferred adding multiple playlists at once, such as within a 'Genre,' and double-clicking would slow them down. This change made the process faster and more efficient.

We also prioritized the ability to collapse playlists over duplicating them, a feature initially pushed by company leadership. All 4 customers agreed that not being able to collapse playlists would make the product too unwieldy, while duplicating playlists was a nice-to-have but not crucial for adoption.

We dedicated more space and focus to the video selection feature, as it could be overwhelming depending on the size of the library. We prioritized bulk importing by title or tag to maximize efficiency.

It became clear how essential a seamless drag-and-drop feature was, as clients' workflows would heavily depend on reorganizing. I tested its usability and collaborated with developers until it felt smooth and intuitive.

04 Seeing results

After launching our MVP, we quickly saw tangible results. The Customer Success team reported nearly 0 complaints or confusion, down from around 20 per week. Any client feedback was focused on feature requests, driven by excitement over gaining full control of their content hierarchy.

We also saw an immediate ~25% increase in client app production, as clients were no longer blocked by our internal team creating unique hierarchies with workarounds. This shift also allowed our devs to focus more on new feature development and maintenance.