TED

Since 2011, Mercury has helped TED spread ideas to millions of people around the world.

TED is a nonprofit organization with a unique vision to educate, motivate, and inspire through the free dissemination of short talk videos and other media. When they wanted to get to market quickly on Android (and didn’t want to staff up to do so), they hired Mercury.

We assigned a team of developers, designers, QA, and a project manager to work with TED’s mobile product team, and together, we built the first iterations of TED’s flagship Android and Android TV offerings. We’ve worked with TED on a daily basis since 2011 and together have released over 100 app updates for TED Android and Android TV to support the Android and Amazon Fire platforms. These releases have included countless feature enhancements and three major redesigns.

    OUR ROLE

  • Android Development
  • Android TV Development
  • Fire TV Development
  • UX Design
  • UI Design
  • QA & Testing
  • User Research
  • Project Management

    TEAM

  • 4 People

    DURATION

  • Ongoing since 2011

TED timeline

Impact

Three time Google Play Store ‘App of the Year’ winner

User satisfaction rating consistently over 4.5 stars since launch

Over 20 million installs with steady, sustained growth

One of only ten launch partners for Android TV’s debut

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Challenges

Uncharted territory

Because of a TED Android launch partnership with Sony, we went a step beyond the daunting task of supporting all of the numerous Android device sizes to also supporting Sony’s short-lived dual‑screen Tablet P.

Going global

TED has a huge international following, and the TED app quickly outgrew Android’s early localization offerings. Working together, we’ve expanded the app’s localization offerings to include UI support for twenty languages, including right-to-left languages as well as over a hundred subtitle languages.

Future-proofing

Planning for the long-term with maintainable code that is future-friendly is key for an app like TED’s. Along with our own code, over the years the app has changed analytics, notification, and ad partners multiple times.

FAB not always fabulous

We introduced a search FAB to TED’s Material redesign launch but quickly realized that users were overlooking search’s new location. Our first step was to adjust the FAB so that it no longer hid as the user scrolled content. Eventually we decided to forgo the FAB altogether and promote search to its own top‑level section.

Considered education

Because TED Talks often are not visually driven and work just as well in audio form, we chose to allow users to continue to play talks they were watching in the background as audio-only, even once the app was closed. This required extensive consideration to educate users on how to use the feature, as well as how to disable it.

Insights

Changes can’t impact quality

We have partnered with TED for over six years. During that time, we’ve had team members change both on TED and Mercury’s side and have managed new relationships, goals, and expectations. Our experience has taught us how to maintain a stable, productive, and successful product even when inevitable changes occur.

Creating a great experience for global users

A great experience for non-English and international users means more than offering video subtitles. Since TED’s talks are translated into right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, the app’s UI should be as well. And these translations have to be vetted and accurate.

Text sizes also need to be considered for labels in more verbose languages so they don’t overlap or prematurely clip. Content presented to non-English users (and the priority in which that content is presented) must also be considered. For example, TED’s latest talks may take a few days to be translated for some languages. Since users prefer talks with subtitles available in their language, the latest TED Talks are not always immediately promoted in all languages.

Sometimes we have needed to think beyond the core mission as well. TED talks have long been used as a language learning resource. To make the TED experience better for language learners, we added dual subtitles so that a user can follow along with two subtitles at the same time.

“The TED app is awesome. There’s no other word for it. Whenever people ask you for an example of how Android apps should look, just give them the TED Android URL.”

Juhani Lehtimaki

author of Smashing Android UI

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