A Modern Digital Experience for the Italian Media Platform
1
The Challenge
Code and Theory partnered with Sky Italia, the renowned broadcaster, to create a modern digital platform experience and publishing workflow.
The challenge was to strengthen Sky Italia’s identity in the Italian news market. There was fierce competition in the digital space from several players with strong historical presence and years of brand legacy in Italy.
Sky Italia were well known as a premium TV provider and in a strong period of audience growth for their digital properties. But they were still not as well known as a digital media outlet and their multiple properties needed to be more clearly connected to the master brand.
Our task was to elevate the digital Sky Italia brand and experience globally, across their verticals — the news channel Tg24, Sky Sport and a new entertainment vertical, Tg24 Spettacolo. Given that the brand was known as a premium TV provider with quality content, our main priority was to increase awareness around their digital offering.
2
The Strategy
User-centric design
At the heart of our strategic approach was creating user-centric design. The key to this framework was understanding user behaviors and how they could help users more easily navigate across verticals to enjoy Sky’s full offering.
By understanding user motivations, leaning into Sky’s core value proposition, and identifying tactical wins, we were able to create a holistic and rigorous strategic approach.
These assumptions were vetted through in-depth user journeys to explore how all the elements could come together.
This approach, in tandem with a flexible set of storytelling tools, allowed Sky Italia to bolster their ability to create engaging, user centric experiences.
3
The Solution
In order to strengthen their digital experience and create a global design system, we collaborated with the teams in Milan across a wide range of areas to reframe their existing processes, including editorial workflows, design systems, advertising integration and technical approach.
Over an ambitious roll-out phase, we worked with their design, product and technical teams, and co-located in their Milan offices. We created a scalable design system with a phased approach, following a robust phase of definition.
Iterative Experience Tactics
We identified experience tactics that would help improve the user experience within the vertical pillars. These included solutions to improve storytelling, loyalty and retention, video, navigation and personalisation. Each one of these tactics was tested, iterated and implemented in an agile process to ensure we were designing the best experience for the user based on market, region and user type.
Foundation and future
In order to support the evolution of their digital business we provided a roll-out framework to bring life to future developments.
The strategy was divided into quick wins, foundational and overhaul solutions. In the short term, we focused on high-impact, low-to-mid effort solutions within the existing structure of the site. We then turned to creating a solid foundation, getting to parity with new versions of existing parts of the sites that would define the foundation and start future processes. Finally, once the core functionalities were performing effectively, we began to focus on new features that would drive the strategic business initiatives and objectives forward.
“Code and Theory enabled us to build a bold, new visual identity across our editorial properties while keeping strong brand recognition. Their structured approach at every step ensured collaboration across the business areas but also with a strong focus on the user. The outcome has been to create a scalable, impactful system that sets a new standard for our digital properties.”
– Chei Amlani, Director of Product and Audience, Sky Italia
