Entertainment, Mass Media, Pay Television, Telecommunications
Partner for end-to-end design and delivery of strategic product
Entertainment, Mass Media, Pay Television, Telecommunications
The Challenge
Sky Television is a New Zealand broadcasting company that provides pay television and broadband to over 1,000,000 customers. Their business was under pressure with a shift in the market to global streaming services. They needed to shore up loyalty among customers for their core satellite TV business. The problem was that although Sky had the content people wanted, their customer experience was not smart, personalised, or seamless across multiple devices, and it was hard to use. The existing path to purchase for joining Sky or upgrading to new products did not provide the control, choice, or transparency customers wanted either. Compounding this was the lack of available design expertise in-house to manage a project of this complexity. They needed a partner to co-design a new product to get the business where they wanted it to be.
What we did
Developed new consumer product Strategy
Designed Hardware, Digital Marketing and eCommerce experience
Informed pricing and go-to-market strategy
Enabled 35,000 sales in the first 3 months
Services
Product Strategy, Customer Experience Design, UX Design, Digital Marketing, Industrial Design
Key insight
The first step was an in-depth immersion into what trust means today by applying the principles of Lean Product Development and Human-centred Design. We conducted over 75 hours of primary research into customers and observed behavioural patterns around "trust" when travelling, paying, proving identity, and applying for products and services. We also incorporated research into decentralised technology and meta-trends that drive investor engagement in the sector.
We unpacked the knowledge of the founders, who opened our minds to how a decentralised identity ecosystem is the future of trust online. A vision started to take shape of a future-state industry where service providers can enable secure customer onboarding and access with less effort, identity verification, and complicated password requirements. We locked in on the idea of "Trust Technology" as a single organising idea for the brand and product, a concept that focused feature development and communicated our unique selling point.
We helped CentraPass articulate their vision and values and laid the foundations for growth with a new purpose: ‘build a digital village where everyone can trust each other again." We brought the development team into this process to ensure we were all aligned with the common intent and aspirations of the team.
Key Insight
Customer data was gathered through immersing ourselves in the daily lives of Sky and non-Sky customers, looking for unmet needs and the outcomes they were hoping to achieve We codified this into a long-list of over 150 customer benefit statements. We then surveyed over 6,000 New Zealanders to identify and rank, precisely which benefits Sky should focus on in order to deliver the biggest customer impact. This was the best of both worlds: deep, qualitative research, validated with statistically valid quantitative research.
We then utilised a framework that enabled Sky to prioritise benefits factoring in the customer data with internal technology and commercial considerations and constraints. Sky used the conclusions from this process to crystallise the customer value proposition, prioritise roadmaps and guide feature development for the New Sky Box.
And Now and Sky were then able to co-create a brief to design the Set Top Box and Remote Control experience, working in partnership with their global hardware partners in England, China and Malaysia. And Now designed the Hardware in close collaboration with customers and the Platform Design Team, utilising a range of lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes which enabled us to test ideas for the user experience, form-factor, colour and materials. With a blueprint of the product experience complete, Sky was now able to select international partners to advance various components of the new Sky Box, ultimately choosing the Google TV platform.
Key Insight
The next challenge was to create an effortless 'buy and upgrade' journey which delivered increased levels of control, choice or transparency. And Now led the user experience strategy, UI design and advised on solution for Content Management System. The biggest challenge was how to test the user experience with users, with prototypes that reflected current and realistic TV content. Prior experience taught us it's too distracting for people to be presented with a concept with TV they hated! In 9 weeks we designed and built 3 hi-fidelity prototypes of the eCommerce experience with fully managed TV content. Our team could quickly spin up an authentic 'sports' or 'family' themed prototype to test with customers, resulting in better data from customers.
With launch date approaching And Now was asked to design and deliver a world-class creative marketing experience that engages, excites, and educates customers about the new Sky Box. The experience was designed to drive registrations of interest ahead of launch, then seamlessly guide people upgrade their existing Sky box experience, or for new customers, to start their Sky journey. We designed and built the digital experience and produced the content, working with our VFX partner and Sky’s inhouse Creative Team to deliver it.
Key Insight
Over the course of the project a global pandemic came and went, consumer perceptions about value for money shifted. Before going to market, Sky needed to check what the mood of the nation was and whether their proposed product and package pricing was going to hit the mark. And Now conducted an extensive review of the customer sentiment amongst current and prospective customers, this provided the Sky Executive with confidence the initiative was set to delight the majority of existing Sky customers and identified an untapped cohort of customers to target. To support go-to-market planning we created a messaging matrix to show how the new Sky Box value proposition and key features shifted in emphasis across different customer segments.
new Sky Box was launched in April 2023
Percentage of Sky considerers who find the New Sky Box appealing
New Sky Boxes sold after 3 months
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