Preview is the go-to app for making movie discovery a breeze, offering personalized recommendations and hassle-free ticket booking. Plus, with its group voting feature, planning movie outings has never been more fun and fast! It's like having a movie-savvy friend in your pocket, ready to make every movie night unforgettable.
Challenge
Finding good movies with the current apps on the market is like a confusing treasure hunt. Navigating them is a tech maze, and spoiler risks are everywhere. Plus, they don't quite live up to their promises of catering to user preferences. These current apps miss the mark when it comes to offering a smooth and user-friendly experience, prompting the need for a fresh approach that genuinely grasps and caters to the diverse needs of movie enthusiasts.
Solution
To tackle our challenge, I conducted extensive user interviews and analysis, uncovered the pain points of scattered movie information, lack of personalization, and spoiler risks. This research guided me to craft a user-friendly design, ensuring seamless movie discovery. I found that users craved simplicity, personalized movie suggestions, and a shield from spoilers. This valuable insight directly influenced the final product, shaping 'Preview' into an intuitive, secure, and personalized movie app that meets the diverse needs of our users.
Users found the app easy to navigate
Reduction in user error rate
Users intend to use the app once launched
My Approach
Getting to Know our Users
Starting off this project, I needed to gain insight into a few key things:
Who are the users?
What do they need?
What they struggle with (in terms of planning trips to the movies)?
To do this, I needed to do a bit of background research (AKA secondary research) to tease out what people are struggling with in this landscape. This is what I found:
From Insights to Sketches, to Reality
Once the MVP features were sorted out, it was time to hash out the user flows- in other words, how users will move through the app when using these features. This is essential in creating a user-friendly app that's not only easy to use, but intuitive as well.
Breaking it Down: Important Features
Next, it's time for the fun part, ✨design✨. Now that we've hashed out how the user will move through and interact with the app, it's time to figure out the layout of the content and how our screens will be structured.
To do this, I sketched out 5 variations of paper wireframes for each screen, took the most suitable elements with functionality as my top priority, and drew "finalized" versions of each paper wireframe.
I then converted these paper wireframes into digital wireframes, created a lo-fi prototype, and tested it, then proceeded to design the hi-fi prototype with the feedback given before another round of usability testing.
Below is a breakdown of some quotes of pain points taken from user interviews and how I planned to solve them.
Putting it to the Test: Measuring the Impact
To verify whether I was on the right track, I conducted 2 rounds of usability testing during this project: the first round with the lo-fi prototype and the second round with the hi-fi prototype, both on the main functionality of the app: booking tickets. Each round of testing consisted of 5 users, each completing 3 main tasks:
Iterations: Major Improvements
Accessibility Considerations
What I've Learned
I learned just how much work goes into the whole design process, which helped me appreciate how vital every role is in a design team- designers, researchers, managers, and developers alike.
Recruiting for user interviews & usability testing can be tough so it's best to start recruiting early.
Although there are many great ideas, it's important to prioritize and narrow down to just a few and establish a solid MVP before adding on more.
Next Steps
Continue usability testing with the other MVP features in the app to determine if there are any pain points or needs that have been overlooked.
Further iterate on designs based on the data and feedback from users.
Prioritize accessibility features to ensure inclusivity for all users.
With time, I'm excited to build out a truly exceptional experience and hopefully launch the app to the App Store once the aforementioned "Next Step" tasks have been completed!
