Playback error messages unification project — Hulu

 

The problem

Playback error messages were the most common errors that viewers encountered while using the Hulu app. They were written by developers and weren't user-friendly. Playback error messages were hardcoded and editing them was a hassle. The error codes didn’t follow any logic and couldn’t help customer support agents know what the error type was.

 

What I did

  • Collaborated with developers and the Playback product manager to create a mini CMS that we called the EMU tool. With this tool, we could now edit the heading, description, error codes, and links associated with the error messages in all platforms and get rid of the process of hard coding error content in sprints.

  • Audited ~80 playback error messages and made sure they all had a consistent structure:

    • what was wrong

    • what the user could do about it

    • a link to our Help Center for more troubleshooting steps if needed

  • I also created a user-friendly error code structure that could be readable over the phone in case customers chose to get assisted support.

    The codes followed a logic that helped agents identify if the issue was Hulu's tech fault (DEV prefix), if it required user education (EDU prefix) or if there were specific troubleshooting steps that viewers could follow and self-serve (TS prefix).

Results

• Decreased assisted support contact rate. I created tracking links to make sure we could segment in Google Analytics the visits to help articles linked from error messages. When we launched in December 2019, one of the articles linked to the most common error message peaked at 112k unique page views with a contact rate of 6% to assisted support (we wanted a low % ). That article had a contact rate of 26% before it was included in the corresponding error message.

• Designed a tool to edit playback error messages without having to wait until developers had time to do our edits in their next sprint

• Added a new channel/responsibility to our team and increased our influence as writing and user experience experts

• Support agents knew what was up the moment they knew the error code. Users were able to identify the error code and share it with the agents as it was now short and displayed in one line on the error message

 
 

Before

hulu error before.jpg

After

hulu error after 2.jpg
 
 

People I worked with

• Product managers

• Developers