Sky’s overall commercial direction began to shift in 2023, focusing on engaging the next generation. I proposed a UX-led approach that successfully positioned platforms and services for younger audiences.
Sky struggled to sell products to Gen Z. Checkout was complicated, pricing felt high, and overall positioning was off. To gain insights, we partnered with universities to access students for interviews and testing.
We conducted interviews with 15 students, exploring their motivations, interactions with housemates, media habits, and UX expectations. This provided the foundation for design decisions.
We set out to understand how to position Sky’s new product, Sky Stream, to Gen Z and in particular, university students.
For this audience, affordability was the first challenge, with students often managing on limited budgets. But our interviews revealed that price alone was not the full story. To gain attention and build trust, we needed to use authentic imagery and video content, combined with lighthearted, tongue in cheek messaging that felt true to their culture. With an average attention span of just eight seconds, this was no small task.
To tackle the challenge, we defined a set of hypotheses, each paired with a clear design principle, which guided our thinking through the ideation phase.
Hypothesis 2: A £29 subscription is too much of a commitment for Gen Z. While we cannot change or reduce Sky’s pricing, how could we find a way to make this cheaper? As our focus was predominantly on the university Gen Z audience, we used research and personas to assess living situations.
Students typically live together in households of three or more. A household only needs one subscription.
They could split the bill. But we could go one step further and split it for them, meaning one student wouldn't have to front the payment.
Now, instead of one student paying £24, four people each pay £6 per month. The price of cheesy chips on a night out. Bargain.
The Split Streamer idea was very complicated as the concept does not exist, so it took a few rounds of user flow mapping to work out how this could actually work in real life.
Complications arose from potential user behaviour, such as dropping out of the group basket, meaning someone would need to edit or amend details of the group, which then alters the price per person.
We decided it would be better to have a “lead streamer” who is responsible for the group’s details. The lead streamer would add users to the checkout, and they would receive an SMS containing a link to add their details and check out. Once they finished, their details would be “held,” and once everyone in the checkout had finished, the order would then be confirmed.
Not only does this make “expensive” Sky products accessible to students on a budget, it also has great business benefits:
We pitched the split streamer subscription idea to our Sky stakeholders, who were very interested in the concept as they had not thought of positioning Stream this way internally themselves. After gaining buy-in, we needed to test this idea with our students.
The true benefit to students of split subscriptions was that it would never be up to one person to cover the bill and request payment from housemates every month. This was a common problem uncovered during user interviews – students hated having to chase housemates for bill money, and it caused them immense anxiety due to fears of either being out of pocket or causing friction among housemates.
We delivered rounds of user testing on site at the University of the West of England, testing two designs with 20 students:
Design A:
Traditionally Sky branded with no split streamer subscription model.
Design B:
Tongue in cheek social media-led design coupled with the split streamer subscription feature.
The reason for testing both prototypes was to understand whether students preferred Sky branded visuals or visuals that were less polished and more in line with the content they are used to seeing on social media, and, of course, to test the concept of the Split Streamer Subscription model.
Comfort and familiarity, according to research, is what Gen Z seek. They also prefer authentic content, where brands speak to them as people rather than consumers. Students are also short on money, so we wanted to know whether a split subscription would be more compelling.
Interestingly, the testing revealed that a hybrid visual approach between the two design routes could be the better option. Some students felt that the social media-led visuals (design B) did not give them enough product information and felt a little forced, while others felt design A did not really speak to them, and as a result, they felt they would be less likely to engage or scroll further.
The split subscription concept landed better than we imagined. We needed to keep reminding students that this was just a concept and did not yet exist. They loved that it did the work for them by splitting the cost, and the lower price for their share was comparable to “cheesy chips on a night out.”
It was the result we were all after. The concept is now being considered internally at Sky as there is significant interest.
During my six years at Rockpool, I contributed and led the design on a wide range of Sky projects, from internal systems to ecommerce platforms and promotional websites. Here is a snapshot of recent work delivered.
Clarion Housing Group: A multi-brand design system
View Axis