How to: Structure your content seamlessly using AXIS’ menus

Sport and entertainment fans are hungry for content – and they want it fast. After all, who has the time to whittle away the hours searching for a show that might be of interest to them? Instead, ensuring you display relevant content in a simple, accessible way is a sure-fire way to catch – and, importantly, maintain – your users’ attention.

In the next of our ‘How to’ series, we’ll explain a handy feature of one of our products, AXIS, that helps you to create an efficient navigation system to unlock a seamless experience for your fans. Read on...

But first things first, what’s AXIS?

It’s our targeted UX management console and suite of multi-reference apps. AXIS has been designed especially for content, marketing, and editorial teams (no matter their level of technical know-how) that are looking to take control of everything an OTT video service user can see and interact with – from design, navigation, and page layout, to promotions and content. You can read all about it here.

Okay, so what are menus? And how do they help to structure content?

They control the Header, Footer, Account, and the Mobile navigation bar within your sport and entertainment apps and they showcase the content you have on offer.

Put simply, they’re super important as they’re the first point of discovery for any user – if they don’t like the ordering of your content, you risk losing viewers as they begin their quest elsewhere for more easily discoverable content.

Within menus, you also have the power to create menu variants to target by device(s), user group(s), languages, segmentation tag(s), date(s), and time of day. Ultimately, no two viewers are the same so why give them the same experience? With menus, you can create different experiences based on each user's way of watching.

The menus you can offer users can be split according to:

1. Primary menus: These display within the navigation bar at the top of the screen (i.e. Home, Movies, and TV Shows). You can link primary menu items to your existing application pages and present your content to end-users.
2. A recent AXIS update means a bottom navigation bar appears for users accessing content via mobile (Android and iOS). This feature enables users to navigate quickly to other areas of your app, such as search, live broadcasts, downloads, or back to the homepage.
3. Sub-menus: Often referred to as “Drawers”, these provide additional links and assets when an end-user hovers over a primary menu item. For example, Sport would be the primary menu item, and Football Highlights would be presented within the sub-menu.

How to edit primary menus

Read on to find out how to edit primary menus to ensure your users can find your sport and entertainment content quickly and easily.

1. To get started, head to AXIS’ Presentation Manager, navigate to DISPLAY and select Menus. Tip: Before adding menu details, double check you’ve selected the correct variant (you can read all about this here in a recent ‘How to').  You’ll be able to see that the area of navigation selected (highlighted in green) on the left-hand side determines the navigation system you’re focusing on, i.e. Header. Account, Footer, or Metadata.
2. Tap the Add Primary Menu Item button to select an existing or create a new primary menu item.
3. Add the following details:
   • Enter label: As you type in the text field, prompts appear containing the letter sequence in your published pages. Your label doesn’t need to be one of the recommended prompts, simply add your own if you’d prefer.
   • Enter destination: Add the page’s URL destination. This could be an internal page within your app or an external URL.
   • Featured: You can determine the priority of your primary menu items when your app’s horizontal screen size is limited, for example, when on mobile or TV. The order and visibility in the sidebar menus are unaffected by this setting.

There you have it – editing your primary menus is as simple as one, two, three!

In the next in our ‘How to’ series, find out how to display lists within menus to create a dynamic, personalized experience. This could include showing certain end-users new content lists or content related to their bookmarks or most watched shows, etc.

Do you have any questions for the team or would you like to find out more about how AXIS can help you to drive user engagement and reduce churn? We’d love to hear from you. 

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