“Show, don’t just tell” : How trailers transformed discovery on BBC iPlayer
Users were watching trailers, but they weren’t helping them decide what to watch.
By rethinking how trailers fit into the experience, I turned them into a key driver of engagement and progression.
iPlayer Web experience
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iPlayer iOS experience
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iPlayer TV experience
Product:
BBC iPlayer
Platform:
iOS, Android, Web, TV
Role:
Lead product designer
Date:
2025
The Problem
Trailers existed within the product, but they weren’t effectively supporting users in deciding what to watch.
On BBC iPlayer, trailers were historically separated from the programmes they were meant to promote, housed within a single aggregated destination. While this structure supported internal organisation, it created a fragmented and ultimately ineffective user journey.
Users could engage with trailers, but that engagement rarely translated into action. After watching, they were unable to seamlessly continue to the programme, access contextual information, or take meaningful next steps such as playing an episode or saving it for later. In effect, trailers existed outside of the decision-making flow they were meant to influence.
This disconnect was a usability issue and a missed growth opportunity. Trailers are one of the most persuasive tools for driving content selection, yet they were absent at the most critical moment: when users were deciding what to watch.
Trailers were housed within a single aggregated destination dedicated just to trailers, rather than living alongside the programme they belonged to. As a result, trailers and programme pages were decoupled from one another.
The Opportunity
Users need multiple signals to move forward in their journey
This work sat within a clearly defined behavioural funnel of discovery, consideration, and commitment.
Discovery → Consideration → Commitment
Users were successfully discovering content and entering the consideration phase, but many were dropping off before committing. The necessary signals weren't there to help users build confidence and move forward.
So, I reframed the challenge from a structural question, "Where should trailers live?”, to a behavioural one:
How might we design a trailer experience that supports the user at the exact moment they need confidence to move forward?
The Hypothesis
Integrating trailers at the right moment in the journey, could reduce uncertainty and drive user's to take action
I hypothesised that integrating trailers directly into programme pages, while allowing users to browse the page and take action without interruption, would reduce uncertainty and increase progression to key commitment behaviours, like playing the programme or adding it to their watchlist.
My Role
I led the end-to-end design, on iOS, android, Web and TV
I worked within a trio of product, design, and engineering, leading the design strategy, ideation and execution across TV, web, and mobile. I defined the problem space, aligning closely with product to ensure we were targeting measurable outcomes.
My role involved shaping the solution within our constraints. This included:
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Influencing roadmap prioritisation by considering user value alongside technical feasibility
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Collaborating with engineering to navigate backend limitations, including the absence of trailer modelling in the CMS
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Working with editorial teams to support new content workflows required to scale the solution
To ensure the solution addressed both user and business needs, I led a series of structured design activities across discovery and definition:
The Design Process
Stakeholder workshops
I began by facilitating stakeholder alignment sessions across product, engineering, and editorial teams to understand existing assumptions, business priorities, and technical constraints. This helped surface competing priorities early.
User
Research
Then to understand user behaviour and intent, I designed and ran moderated usability research with 20 users in a lab-based environment that closely replicated real-world TV usage. These sessions focused on how users evaluate content in a lean-back context.
Journey
maps
I translated these insights into journey maps that visualised key decision points across the user experience. This made it clear that users move through a series of micro-decisions rather than a single “watch or not” moment.
Iteration and prototyping
From there, I developed and iterated on prototypes across TV, web, and mobile, testing different interaction patterns and levels of immersion. This allowed me to explore trade-offs and refine solutions that worked consistently across platforms.
Insights from the research
Users needed trailers to be surfaced at the exact moment they needed confidence to move forward in their journey.
Through moderated user research, I uncovered that users don’t only rely on one factor to decide what to watch. Instead, they build confidence and eventually make their decision using multiple signals.
Users consistently relied on a combination of:
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Trailers
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Synopsis and metadata
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Imagery and genre cues
Crucially, they wanted to watch the trailer without interrupting their browsing on the programme page.
This led to a key shift in thinking: trailers should not be treated as a standalone experience, but as part of a broader system supporting decision-making.
The research also revealed a tension around autoplaying the trailer. While stakeholders believed autoplay would increase awareness, many users found it intrusive and disruptive. For the initial release, I prioritised user control, and postponed autoplay for further research and testing, leaving space for it in future experimentation.
Rather than making a single “watch or don’t watch” choice, users navigate a series of decision junctions where they assess whether to move forward. Understanding these junctions revealed that helping users deicide what to watch isn’t about one pivotal moment, but about supporting users across multiple points in their journey.
The Solution
iPlayer Web experience
iPlayer iOS experience
iPlayer TV experience
iPlayer Web experience
iPlayer TV experience
iPlayer iOS experience
I designed an in-situ trailer experience embedded directly within programme pages, allowing users to watch trailers while continuing to browse and take further actions.
This enabled users to:
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Watch a trailer whilst maintaining their place on the programme page
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Read synopsis and explore metadata simultaneously
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Add programmes to their watchlist in the moment of watching the trailer
Trade-offs
By not defaulting to full-screen playback, I reduced immersion into the trailer, in favour of efficiency and control. This aligned more closely to the research finding that users evaluate if a programme is for them by using multiple signals rather than committing to a single, linear experience.
On web and mobile, I balanced this by introducing optional full-screen expansion, allowing users to opt into a more immersive experience. On TV, platform constraints meant that video size can’t increase when playing, requiring me to design a consistent but platform tailored solution across devices.
I also expanded the role of trailers beyond just surfacing one trailer. By surfacing all related trailers within the programme page, I created a more cohesive discovery experience and laid the groundwork for future enhancements such as contextual labelling (e.g. teaser, extended, behind the scenes), helping users navigate content more efficiently.
We validated the approach through controlled experimentation, comparing:
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A baseline experience with no integrated trailers
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An initial release
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A refined second iteration
This allowed us to measure the impact of integrating trailers directly into the user
journey and iterate based on observed behaviour.
While autoplay was not included in the initial release, it was identified as a key area for future testing. A controlled experiment comparing autoplay versus user-initiated playback would allow us to quantify its impact on both engagement and potential negative signals such as increased drop-off.
Experimentation
A/B/C testing was used to validate the design approach
Impact
The new experience increased engagement and strengthened progression through the funnel
Within the first three months of launch across TV, web, and mobile, the new experience demonstrated a significant shift in user behaviour.
Users were 3x more likely to add programmes to their watchlist, indicating increased confidence during the decision-making process. Trailer engagement also increased substantially, with 1.5 million trailer play clicks recorded.
Beyond the product itself, we saw a +135% increase in trailer clicks from off the product, highlighting improved discoverability and reach outside the platform.
While programme play starts remain the primary metric, these results show clear improvement in the consideration stage of the funnel.
Guardrails
I was careful to ensure that this experience did not cause any unintended negative experiences.
In particular, I:
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Maintained user control of the trailer
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Postponed autoplay until I could understand how to integrate it in a non-disruptive way
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Preserved uninterrupted browsing on the programme page
This ensured that the experience did not introduce negative side effects such as increased exits or reduced usability.
Scale & Systems Impact
The solution was rolled out across 154 programmes, with a clear path to 400+. Delivering this required foundational changes, including new CMS structures and editorial workflows to support programme-linked trailers.
This shifted trailers from being a standalone asset to becoming an important part of the product ecosystem, aligning content and technology around a shared goal of using trailers to increase engagement and connect users to long-form content.
What I would do next...
Further iteration on how the trailer is played to the user could unlock better long term results
I would prioritise controlled experimentation around autoplay, testing whether it can be introduced in a way that enhances engagement without disrupting the experience. There is also an opportunity to further optimise for programme ‘play starts’ through more contextual calls to action, particularly immediately after trailer playback.
Personalisation is another opportunity I’d like to explore. Tailoring how the trailer is surfaced and playing based on user behaviour and preferences, could further improve the decision making experience.
Learnings and reflections
Reframing the problem is usually the key to unlocking the right solution
One of the most valuable lessons I've learned through this process is that even the most obvious assumptions are worth validating.
When we first received the brief, the problem felt clearly defined: find a place for trailers to live on iPlayer. It was a reasonable starting point and on the surface it seemed obvious, trailers exist, iPlayer exists, we just needed to work out where to put them. The assumption was so embedded in the brief that we barely registered as an assumption at all.
But as we began to dissect the challenge more carefully, it became clear that "where should trailers live?" was actually the wrong question. It framed the problem as a placement exercise when the real opportunity was about supporting users at the right stage in their user journey.
I learnt that even the most confident, well-intentioned starting points carry assumptions. Getting underneath them early, before any design decisions are made, became one of the key factors to the success of the project.