Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, including some wireframes to help set context of your thoughts and questions! I’ll provide some background info, and take you through our thinking in a story-format…
During our mobile redesign of last year we sought to provide clear IA/UX separation of a content creators media catalogue (i.e. Past Broadcasts, Highlights, Clips etc) and their supporting features that were previously consolidated into a single, cluttered, unfocused ‘channel page’ alongside currently playing video and more.
Through acute prioritization of user goals, we saw the creation of a dedicated playback page – aka “Theater Page” – where we surfaced contextual features or options related only to the media the user was watching in that moment. This greatly increased engagement where there were a myriad of options, buttons and navigational routes that previously proved distracting.
Extensions play into that core page goal as a related contextual experience. It was clear why and where we needed to surface this to users on mobile, but the question was ‘how’ and ‘when’ - also across mobile & tablet, portrait & landscape orientations in a way that made extension development simple.
One of the first designs my designers did was almost exactly like the wireframes above. It makes logical sense to treat chat and individual extensions as options you can navigate between while watching media. You have the benefit of seeing whats available upfront right!?
Through some simple prototypes, the team quickly realized that having chat, and extensions on the same plain “just…ehhh, didn’t feel right”. Digging into this, and questioning (internal/external users) we started realizing that the current batch of extensions where fantastic material to glance at, to have on-hand when needed, but the core focus of their time was still watching video and engaging in chat.
I dubbed this “the 2nd monitor paradigm”. Putting chat at the same level as extensions, such as in a tab construct, caused a lot of navigational friction when users wanted to multi-task between, to “glance”, or quickly interact with an extension before settling back into video + chat. (i.e. I want to see the extension in tab 6, and then go back to chat - how can I do this quickly?)
That is where the collapsing ‘chat toolbar’ flow came to be. It allowed for easier multi-tasking. You can bounce quickly back-n-forth between chat and an extension. In fact, you can ‘park’ an extension (it remembers the tab you had focused) making this multi-tasking even speedier between the two.
Now, this is a big bet on user behavior, but we have modeled it on user journeys/flows we have witnessed and the types of extensions being developed (you’ve all done some cool work!). As you guys test the boundaries of extension interaction, different extension types, and as we learn more from the user base through their usage (quantitative and qualitative) we will of course adapt the UI and how users watch media and interact around it.