Tracking your media watchlist, made easier

I enrolled in Google’s UX Design Professional Certificate class on Coursera, and for my first project I designed a Watchlist app that saves your favorite shows’ episodes and helps you explore upcoming ones in response to today’s popular video streaming climate.

Role UX Designer

Context Case study

Contribution Design, ideation, research, prototype

WHAT’S THE CONTEXT?

Streaming services today are constantly releasing content, and users are having difficulty keeping up with them. Watchlist’s goal is to help track these shows, but that’s not how this project started.

My initial prompt was to design a movie app that also helped users to follow their favorite actors and directors’ upcoming projects. Following the design thinking process, I interviewed frequent moviegoers to hear their needs, conducted a competitive analysis to see how similar movie apps fulfill the needs of their users, and then lead a usability study with my wireframes to gather insight. After the usability test interviews, I redefined my project to serve a new purpose and ideated the design into a solution.

THE CHALLENGE

Consumers can rejoice with streaming services warring against one another as they pump out content for our entertainment. However, that can be burdensome when users must keep a mental note of when their favorite shows are releasing across multiple streaming services and networks. How do I relieve users of this burden?

OUTCOME

I prototyped this concept with a few people and most of them said they would use this tool because it would be helpful to conglomerate their shows from multiple streaming services.

Research

To test out my concept, I asked users questions surrounding why they go to the movies, their approach, and tried to learn how their experience could be improved.

Competitive analysis

Continuing my research, I performed a comp. analysis for competing products to learn their patterns, what they do well, what’s consistent, and how they stand out.

Usability study

I conducted a usability study with users that would go to the movie theater at least 6 times a year. Here, I learned their moviegoing habits, particular needs, and experience with my wireframe.

Here’s what I learned:

Takeaway

Users did not think my app was useful, so I’ll address a new need that my participant shared.

The users did not believe that a typical movie app where you can also follow actors and directors solved any of their needs, so they wouldn’t want this tool on their phones. Users also didn’t believe there was room to improve similar movie apps. So, I took this opportunity to redefine my project to address the new need from my participants, and create a tool for people to track the progress of their shows.

Problem statement

How might we relieve users the burden of keeping a mental watchlist of all of their shows that they are currently watching?

Final design

Across various movie and streaming service apps, their home pages typically have the same look. This style would continue with my app. The home page would present users with new and trending shows, and they would have the ability to bookmark and filter them by relevant tags.

Conclusion and final thoughts

  • My research questions could have been more relevant.

  • Pivoting the project from one person’s feedback was not enough, however since this was a class projects and there weren’t any real world stakes, I decided to move forward.

  • Often times I was relying on what I think was best when I should have been more user-centered and focused on research.

  • I should have been more mindful about my time management given that there was a deadline for this project.

  • This was my first ever UX case study and I’m proud of the work I put in and how everything turned out in the end.