Case Study

Movies
Anywhere

Client: The Walt Disney Company

Background:
Disney Movies Anywhere (DMA) was the original digital locker experience for Disney titles. As Disney prepared to evolve DMA into Movies Anywhere (MA)—an open, cross-studio, cross-retailer platform—we needed to solve for scale, usability, and a true multi-platform ecosystem spanning web, mobile, living room devices, and partner storefronts.

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Design

Strategy

Results

Research

Case Study

The Challenge

Product and UX challenges made the legacy locker hard to scale:

  • Siloed experience couldn’t onboard new studios and retailers efficiently.
  • Platform lock-in (tightly coupled to iTunes) limited catalog reach and Android support.
  • Friction in core flows (redeem, link accounts, purchase, playback) drove drop-offs and support issues.

My Role

Principal UX Architect for the cross-platform effort. I:

  • Defined the experience strategy and product vision across web, iOS, Android, and TV platforms.
  • Built the cross-platform design system + UI framework, enabling consistent patterns and faster delivery.
  • Led a multi-disciplinary team (platform designers, product, and engineering partners) to design and ship the web experience while guiding platform-specific implementations.
Case Study

Research

Gathering Insights

Partner Research: Viewership Behavior by User Type

Partnered with a research firm to map how core segments (Collectors, Family Organizers, Cross-Retail Power Users, Mobile-First, New-to-Digital) discover, redeem, link, and watch.

We found linking intent spikes right after purchase/redeem, trust hinges on clear entitlement visibility, and momentum drops without a prominent “Play next”—insights that drove a unified linking model, clearer success states, predictable handoffs, and consistent component defaults across platforms.

Mapping the Current State

We benchmarked DMA across devices to identify where users struggled most. We prioritized end-to-end, high-impact moments—the steps that determine whether a new user successfully links providers, redeems a code, and watches a first movie.

Key Findings

  • Account Linking & Purchase handoffs (to and from iTunes/Google Play) created confusion, context loss, and dead-ends.
  • Redeem flow clarity (where to enter codes, what “success” means, what happens next) was inconsistent.
  • Navigation & iconography varied across platforms, increasing cognitive load and time to complete tasks.
  • Time-to-First-Play lagged leading streaming benchmarks, highlighting friction in early-life user journeys.

We turned these findings into a prioritized opportunity map, focusing on the few moments with the highest cumulative impact on activation and satisfaction.

Strategy

What Does Success Looks Like

Product Vision

Create a unified, studio-agnostic digital locker that seamlessly connects a user’s purchased movies across retailers and devices—so the user can link, redeem, discover, and watch with minimal friction anywhere.

North Star Outcomes

  • Reduce time-to-first-play for new users.
  • Increase completion rate for linking providers and redeeming codes.
  • Lower support burden by clarifying cross-retailer handoffs and recovery paths.

Experience Principles

  • Decouple content and presentation so the same title model powers every surface.
  • Consistent patterns across platforms, tuned to context (on-the-go vs in-home).
  • Guardrails over guesswork—clear states, recoveries, and next-best actions.

Design

Designing & testing

Hero Moments (High-Impact Flows)

We re-architected the moments that matter most:

Link Accounts

  • Single mental model for linking providers (uniform steps, progress states, and back/return logic).
  • Post-link confirmation explains where titles will appear and what to do next.

Redeem Codes

  • Clear entry points and error handling.
  • Success screens that confirm entitlements and prominent “Play next” actions.

Purchase & Return from Partner

  • Predictable outbound handoff + robust inbound detection when the user returns.
  • Button and state logic update immediately (no “still says Buy” confusion).

First-Play & Playback

  • Streamlined first-time playback with thoughtful defaults, accessibility, and controls that behave identically across platforms.

Framework & System

  • Introduced a multi-platform tiered system (content model → components → UI), enabling shared logic with platform-specific nuances.
  • Built a component library for repeatable flows (linking, redeem, sign-in, entitlement states), accelerating delivery and consistency.

Mobile & Context of Use

  • On-the-Go: focus on viewing, approvals, notifications, and quick actions.
  • In-Home: richer browsing, management, and setup tasks.

Iteration & Validation

We ran iterative usability studies—across web, iOS, and Android—to validate navigation, terminology, and flow resilience (especially for handoffs and recovery). Findings fed directly into component and copy refinements before engineering handoff.

Usability Studies

A cadence of lab studies + in-context testing measured completion times, comprehension, and error/recovery paths for the target flows. We focused on:

  • Time-to-First-Play improvements for new users.
  • Task completion for link/redeem/purchase handoffs.
  • Iconography, labels, and empty/error states to reduce ambiguity.

The resulting UX patterns became defaults in the component library, ensuring learn-once-use-everywhere consistency.

Results

Bringing it all together

Phase 1 (MVP)

Launch

Movies Anywhere launched on October 12, 2017, with:

  • 4 major studios onboarded at launch (20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros).
  • 4 major retailers supported (Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes, VUDU).
  • Broad platform coverage: web, iOS/Android mobile & tablet, Android TV, Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire devices.

Impact

  • A scalable, studio-agnostic locker with predictable, lower-friction flows for linking, redeeming, and first-time playback.
  • A cross-platform design system that shortened iteration cycles and reduced UX inconsistencies.
  • Clear handoff patterns that reduced confusion and support issues around purchases and returns.
MA
MA
MA
MA

Future State

Following the initial launch, the team continued to:

  • Onboard additional titles and platforms and expand features (e.g., social sharing and family-friendly capabilities like Screen Pass).
  • Evolve the component library and content model, maintaining consistency as the ecosystem grew.
  • I was promoted to Senior Manager, leading the broader UX team as we scaled the platform’s capabilities.

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