6 Tips To Improve Your OTT App's UX

Short for "User Experience," in today's digital world UX, really is the cornerstone of what you're offering to your own users. If you want to get your OTT contents out to the people in the fastest, most efficient way possible, launching your own OTT "Over-The-Top" apps is one of the best ways to do that. One recent study has revealed that OTT apps have the power to grow your audience and revenue by more than 30%!

But that said, if your OTT app isn't incredibly easy to use and downright enjoyable to engage with, you can rest assured that people are going to quickly start to look elsewhere for the content they seek - and they're probably not coming back, either.

With all that in mind, if you truly want to improve your own OTT app's user experience, there are a few key things you'll want to keep in mind.

Along the same lines, your OTT app needs to be easy to use - no matter what. As your app becomes more complicated to use, it also becomes less fun to engage with - even if the content that the app is serving up remains the same.

Because of that, your goal is simple: always make sure it's becoming MORE fun and LESS complicated at all times. Truly, things don't have to be much more complicated than that.

One of the most straightforward principles of UX design is also, thankfully, among the most important. If you really want to offer a superior user experience, you need to go out of your way to make sure that experience is as consistent as possible.

This means that everything - from the font selection to the design of components like buttons to the control scheme at the heart of every page - need to feel like they're a logical extension of one another.

This can encompass small steps - like making sure that your brand's logo looks the same whenever it appears - as well as large steps, like making sure each "page" of the app always scrolls in the same direction. The more consistent you can make someone's experience, the more rewarding that experience will ultimately be.

An important part of consistency - and UX in general - also has to do with patterns that directly relate to "how" and "why" your OTT app functions the way it does.

On one level, patterns all feed into a larger kind of a rulebook that everyone on your design team can all reference at the same time. This helps guarantee that everyone is on the same page, no matter which part of the app they're actually working on.

On a deeper level, you're also going out of your way to make the actual "control" of your app second nature. People don't have to "figure out" how to use your OTT app so much as they just "know" - and they get to that point because the patterns at the heart of your control decisions are almost instinctual to a certain extent.

Another one of the best ways to improve your OTT app's UX has to do with making sure that your intention versus your impact are as closely aligned as you think they are. In essence, every time a new feature is implemented or a decision is made regarding the app's functionality, you need to ask yourself two questions:

For the sake of both your brand and your users, the answer to that second question must always be "yes."

Finally and perhaps most importantly is the idea that UX improvement isn't something that you "do once and forget about." It's a goal that you need to be as proactive about as possible - which means that comprehensive UX reviews and audits should be conducted on a regular basis.

Today's perfect user experience may be woefully inadequate tomorrow. Only by making an effort to reflect on how far you've come will you be able to see how much ground you still have left to cover, so to speak. UX reviews and audits also allow you to stop making the same mistakes over and over again and truly allow you to put your users front and center where they belong.