Helping Cartoon Network define their next digital product
by Aerolab
Cartoon Network
Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) brought us along on their quest to re-think Cartoon Network into a digital experience that’s both appealing and constructive for a new generation of users.
Don’t call it a comeback.
Since launching in 1992, Cartoon Network has been a staple in entertainment. One of the reasons for the platform’s sustained success is the fact that they’re not afraid to change to remain relevant. For this project, TBS wanted to make a statement by making Cartoon Network’s digital experience a delighting, memorable one.
Project summary
Team size
8 participants
Duration
9 Months
Deliverables
UX, UI, Development
Project type
Product
Methodologies used
Business Research and Consultation, Benchmarking, On-Site Workshops, Usability Testing, Ideation Sessions, User Research & Discovery, User personas, User interview and usability testings, Interaction Design, Casos de Uso, Wireframes de contenido y estructura, Prototype, Visual Design, UI Guidelines, UI Kits, Documentation
“As our industry undergoes huge evolution, the impact of digital disruption and changing consumer behaviour continues to put audience insight right at the heart of our business strategy”
Gerhard Zeiler
President at Turner International
Thinking in products
We kicked-off the project in style, with a fruitful Product Thinking workshop conduced at TBS Headquarters in London for their regional directors.
Nobody said it was going to be easy
Every project has constraints. It’s a good thing we love a challenge.
- – 15 stakeholders spread over the globe
- – Online presence in 32 countries
- – 19 languages for the users and the editors
- – Ad-driven monetization model
- – GDPR kicked in
Turning users into gamers.
During the discovery phase we delved deep into Cartoon Network’s business model, their competitive landscape and how they add value to their different audiences.
The insights we got from the London workshop helped us hone our research into more in-depth hypotheses around user profiles.
User personas usually help us build empathy with users. But it’s a limited methodology and, since we were working with a culturally diverse demographic, we started looking for alternatives.
Building upon the hypothesis that kids all over the world turn to platforms like Cartoon Network for entertainment, we started thinking of our users as players and listed the roles they could take with a revisited version of Bartle’s Taxonomy of player types
Build it, ship it, test it, fix it.
Due to regulations and good practices regarding the involvement of children in fieldwork research, we teamed up with Dubit to conduct User Interviews and Usability Tests on our first prototype.
We traveled to the UK on this occasion, and had the opportunity to validate or refute the hypothesis and assumptions formulated during the research phase. We also collected relevant data regarding children’s behaviour and their use of connected devices.
Around the world, autour du monde, en todo el mundo.
One of the hardest parts of designing a product for 32 countries is making sure the design fits several linguistic environments. Our job was to make it simple for local editors to create content without having to re-adjust the interface every time.
Which means we had to figure out things like…
––––
- Mobile device size use in emerging markets
- Large translations
- Right to Left layout
- Font independency for Latin-based and non-Latin based languages
The results
We delivered a working product along with a design system that set the foundation to build upon.
We also provided CN with specific documentation aimed at helping them promote coherence and consistency through their teams around the world, while giving them the freedom and flexibility to create regional content without bureaucratic hurdles.
