ITVX | Soaps Category
A dynamic Soaps experience
Company:
ITVX
Duration:
12 weeks
Role:
Product Designer
TL;DR
ITVX is ITV's streaming and catch-up platform, serving a broad audience across drama, reality, sports, soaps and documentary content. Despite having a large and diverse user base, the product and design teams were working without a shared, research-grounded view of who their users were, how they watched, and what motivated their behaviour.
Without that foundation, product decisions risked being made in a vacuum - optimising for assumed users rather than real ones.
Working alongside one other lead product designer, I led the research design, recruitment, interviewing, synthesis and persona creation end to end.
The Problem
Product teams were making design and editorial decisions without a shared understanding of the ITVX user base. There was no documented framework capturing how different types of users discovered content, what their viewing habits looked like across the week, what their blockers were, or how they interacted with the platform across different devices.
The result was a gap between the users being designed for and the users actually using the product.
Objectives
Process
Audience segmentation
Before recruiting participants, I reviewed ITVX's existing marketing audience segmentation to identify the age brackets and lifestyle criteria that would ensure the research pool accurately represented the full breadth of ITVX users. A screener was designed to match participants across the five main ITVX genre categories - Drama, Reality, Sports, Soaps and Documentary - ensuring no major user type was underrepresented.
Interview design
I designed a structured but conversational interview template to capture consistent data across all 52 participants. Each interview covered lifestyle and living situation, favourite genres, services and apps used, goals, challenges and limitations, and an hour-by-hour schedule of content consumption across a typical weekday, Saturday and Sunday.
Participants were also asked about specific behaviours - how they discovered new shows, whether they avoided spoilers, their relationship with recommendation algorithms, their use of trailers, and whether they downloaded content for offline viewing. The depth of the schedule data in particular was designed to give editorial teams genuinely actionable insight into when different types of users were watching and on which devices.
Affinity mapping
The tagged observations were synthesised into groups of aligned behaviours. By cross-referencing each behaviour with the interview profiles it appeared in, I was able to write insights explaining what was driving each key behaviour - moving from raw data to meaningful interpretation.
The Four Personas
Dynamo - The Time Restricted Watcher
Busy, schedule-driven and spoiler-averse. Plans viewing around a demanding lifestyle, researches shows in advance and needs to watch new episodes as soon as they drop. Relies on word of mouth and values efficiency in content discovery above all else.
Passive -The Background Watcher
Uses TV primarily for background noise and company throughout the day. Favours familiar, low-attention content that doesn't require continuous focus. Wants the platform to do the work of surfacing appropriate content without having to actively search.
Escapist - The Weekend Binge Watcher
Time-poor during the week but deeply committed to the shows they care about. Saves content for immersive weekend sessions, researches what to watch carefully beforehand and won't invest time in something that doesn't come highly recommended.
Immersive - Watches for the Experience
Highly engaged and spoiler-conscious. Doesn't always have access to the main TV so frequently watches on mobile or laptop. Follows social conversation around shows closely and wants to stay current to participate in the cultural moment around their favourite programmes.
Each persona was brought to life through user journey mapping, scenario-based storytelling and How Might We exercises — translating the research into immediately actionable design opportunities.
For each persona, a realistic scenario was written - a specific moment in their week where their needs, motivations and blockers all converged. These scenarios were then mapped as user journeys, with friction points identified and opportunity areas surfaced for the product team.
Examples of opportunities that emerged:
A prominent, frequently-visited location for upcoming shows to support advance planning
Contextual metadata on homepage tiles to aid faster decision making
A My List notification system to alert users when a saved show becomes available
A "background boxsets" content rail surfaced during daytime hours
Seamless cross-device handoff to support mobile-first viewing habits
Trusted third-party ratings such as IMDB scores to support considered content discovery
Outcome
The four personas were delivered to and adopted by the core ITVX streaming product and design team as a shared reference framework for product decision making, feature prioritisation and editorial scheduling. By grounding the personas in 52 hours of direct user research, they represented one of the most substantive qualitative research initiatives undertaken at ITVX - giving teams a genuine, evidence-based understanding of who they were designing for.
Learnings
Depth beats breadth in qualitative research.
52 one-hour interviews is a significant commitment, but the richness of data it produced - particularly the hour-by-hour schedule detail - would not have been possible with shorter or more superficial sessions. The investment in depth paid off in the quality of the personas.
Behavioural patterns are more useful than demographic ones.
The four personas that emerged were defined entirely by viewing behaviour, not age or demographics. Two people of the same age and background could sit in completely different persona groups depending on how they actually watched. That distinction made the personas genuinely useful for product decisions rather than just descriptive.
Personas need quantitative validation to reach their full potential.
The next logical step - matching each persona cohort against Amplitude behavioural data - would have transformed this from a qualitative initiative into a fully mixed-methods framework. That remains the opportunity for whoever builds on this work.
Research is a product in itself.
The personas weren't just a deliverable - they were a shared language for the team. Getting product, design and editorial aligned around the same user archetypes changed how conversations about prioritisation and scheduling were framed. That shift in how teams talked about users was as valuable as the personas themselves.
