Median
Overview
Team
Problem Statement
Raja V S
Sweta Shankar
Mayur Salunke
Vasudha Singh
Joanne Tsao
Breaking into the film industry can often be a difficult endeavor. While the entertainment and media industry is massive, it is also a disorganized sector that can be hard to navigate as a newcomer to the field without any connections. In order to alleviate this issue, our team decided to build a networking platform to allow fellow creatives to connect with each other and discover new job opportunities in the industry.
Role
Solution
MediaN is a film industry networking mobile platform that allows anyone in the field to make new connections with other professionals, discover new opportunities, and further their personal professional growth.
UX designer,
UX researcher
Date
Jan. 2022 - May. 2022
Process
Research
User Surveys
We wanted to better understand who our target demographic would be for this project, so we created an 11 question survey using Google Forms to send out to various film professional groups. We found that 80% of those those who had responded were over 30 years old, and that 66.7% of those who had responded reported that it took them more than 45 days to find a job.
Generative User Interviews
We reached out to various film groups on social media platforms again to schedule one-on-one interviews with qualifying participants. Over the course of the next 2 weeks, we were able to speak with 8 participants from different professions within the film industry. Our team synthesized our findings and found these key themes:
Competitive Analysis
Our team decided to research what was already on the market so that we could get an idea of features that needed to be included in our design and features that would be nice to include.
User Personas
Given our interview findings, we were able to gather goals, pain points, and behaviors from our interviewees to create user personas to reflect who we were designing for.
User Journey Map
To further illustrate the interaction between the user and our mobile platform, we created a user journey map to show the various phases a user might move through as they first begin using the platform to becoming an experienced user. The emotions a user might progress through during their experience of the platform are also shown to highlight the potential impact our platform could have on those in the film industry.
Design
Information Architecture
When developing our platform, we wanted to lay out the functions being designed and where they would go in the app. The structure of our information is as follows:
Prototyping
Testing
Usability Testing
For user testing, we used the site User Testing to remotely source participants test our prototype. Participants ranged from ages 25-39 and came from a variety of different backgrounds. We tested with a total of 12 users and ran through 2 rounds of testing. A key technical issue we discovered during testing was that the bottom navigation bar was not showing up during testing, which significantly impacted user test results and led to many users being unable to complete their tasks. After making the aforementioned iterations to our wireframes, we underwent one more round of user testing. For this last round of user testing, 3 participants were remotely sourced as well from the site User Testing.
Main issues that stemmed from the design of the interface included users not being able to locate the shoutout button and not being able to find the side menu due to it being hidden in the profile thumbnail. These following tasks were assigned to the users:
Our final prototype can be found here!
Takeaways + Next Steps
Key Learnings
From this project, I learned the importance of structuring the information architecture of a design before diving into prototyping, as having a structure allows for a more streamlined design process and prevents confusion over having to figure out where everything goes later.
During our user testing phase, we had a couple of errors in our prototype that went unnoticed, which affected the users running through our prototype and caused us to lose out on feedback that might have been helpful because users were unable to properly interact with the screens.
In the future, more testing is needed to improve the usability of this interface. Doing accessibility checks throughout the process is also needed to ensure that we are following along WCAG guidelines and creating an interface that is usable by everyone.