WayfairTV: Hidden Gems

WayfairTV is a fun and engaging way for AppleTV users to discover interesting & quirky Wayfair products.

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Inspiration

A few of us were sitting around joking about some "out there" ideas that we could do for Challenge Day, and one of those was an AppleTV app. The more we discussed it, the more we realized it actually made a lot of sense given the visual nature of both TV and Wayfair's catalog.

What it does

WayfairTV: Hidden Gems allows customers to browse and favorite "Interesting Finds" in 16 categories such as "Under $25," "Fun and Quirky, and "Brands We Love." It's a fun and easy way to browse the more eclectic side of Wayfair, right from the comfort of your couch and big screen TV.

Are you a customer who still needs a few gifts for the holidays, but are trying to stay budget-friendly? Check out the hidden gems in our "Under $25" or "Under $50" categories. Your loved ones will love them, and so will your wallet!

Products that a customer has favorited appear in the Wayfair mobile apps and on the Wayfair web sites, allowing users to purchase them and even find related items.

TV is a great platform for Wayfair because of the visual nature of our product catalog. Seeing products on a big screen is a truly engaging way to explore those products.

How we built it

This project was built as a native AppleTV (tvOS) app. The team iterated through rapid design mocks to settle on a design we loved, and then created a tvOS app framework from scratch. Once we had an empty app that would launch, we "divide and conquered" the remaining work.

That involved:

  • Porting client services and related dependencies from the Wayfair iOS app to tvOS to use the existing Wayfair backend for authentication, product recommendations and idea board management.
  • Building out a unique and delightful AppleTV experience for viewing and selecting categories, displaying and favoriting products from those and presenting the products in a visually engaging way.
  • Removing "rough edges" to deliver on our goals of a fun and engaging experience

Challenges we ran into

  • Members of our team had limited or no experience working on a tvOS app, so there was a lot of "learn as we go."
  • tvOS has limitations that iOS doesn't. For example, there's no local storage for apps to use. We had to consider these differences during development.
  • Two of our four team members work remotely. We used Slack, Google Hangouts and Google docs to collaborate and coordinate our efforts. This broke down the distances between us and allowed us to efficiently distribute the workload.
  • Reuse/porting of existing services code from iOS to tvOS was challenging, but came together well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We completed our MVP! Building a functioning Wayfair AppleTV app in such a tight timeframe is a major accomplishment, especially when some of us have never worked on AppleTV projects before.
  • The collaboration and teamwork was amazing. Since teammates worked on the WayfairTV project from their locations in Massachusetts, Georgia and New Hampshire, that really speaks to how well we managed the project, coding tasks and communication.

What we learned

  • Working on AppleTV apps and pop-up innovation projects with fellow Wayfairians is a blast.
  • Division of labor and communication were critical to our success
  • There's untapped opportunity for Wayfair in the AppleTV space

What's next for WayfairTV: Hidden Gems

  • Get feedback on the app and determine what an MVP2 should look like
  • Brainstorm about including videos and other opportunities for Wayfair and AppleTV
  • Include metrics so we can measure engagement and results.
  • Get the code reviewed, in our pipeline and production-ready
  • Ship It!
  • Explore opportunities on other set-top box platforms.
  • WayfairTV: Hidden Gems for our brand stores!

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