Role

• Project Manager

• Client Liaison

• UX Researcher

• Data Analyst

• Graphic Designer

Tools

• Figma

• Miro

• ClickUp

• Google Drive & Surveys

• Optimal Workshop

• Adobe Illustrator

Client

• Lauren Rosenthal founder of Birdie

Release Date

• December 2020

• 3-Week Sprint

competitive analysis

The client had already conducted a competitor analysis, so I focused on areas that the client had not focused on. I compared Birdie to four apps that are also designed to allow users to review movies and shows. I also compared it to Goodreads which allows users to rate and review books they have read. The analysis helped identify features that were lacking or altogether missing. We took that information and used it to direct the focus of our questioning in our user research interviews.

User research

We conducted seven user research interviews. Some of the questions included

• What is your opinion of reviews in general?

• Do you watch TV/Movies with other people regularly? What is the experience like in choosing what to watch with another person?

• How do you pick a new movie/TV show to watch?

• Do you recommend shows/movies to others? When you do, how long are your recommendations: a few words, a few sentences, a few paragraphs?

• Do you keep a list of ‘things to watch’? If so where/how?

Affinity Mapping

After the interviews, we used Miro to create digital stickie notes and began creating a virtual affinity map. Affinity maps are incredibly valuable for synthesizing data. We grouped the responses into categories and from there we generated key takeaways from the seven interviews. Those takeaways were essential in generating a prototypical potential Birdie user.

Participants almost universally agreed that they don’t want to write reviews, yet 100% find them valuable. There was also agreement among our interviewees that they prefer recommendations from their personal network over anonymous reviews from services like IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes. They also prefer shorter reviews. Another common response was remarking on how hard it is to agree on what to watch with others. Participants also had a general lack of any real system for keeping a list of movies/shows they want to watch.

Persona

We used our research and the affinity map to create the persona of Natalie Nolan to serve as an archetype that we could use to validate our design choices as the project progressed.

Problem Statement

We used our research to identify the major pain points for our users, allowing us to construct our problem statement:

Feature inventory

We utilized a feature inventory, based on our research and my competitive analysis to create prioritized list of features to include in our prototype.

Feature Inventory was very helpful in getting the team on the same page on what features we wanted to focus on.

USER SURVEYS

We surveyed twenty potential Birdie users (mean and median age: ~35). Outside of basic demographic information we asked ten questions about the participants’ feelings toward the main features that Birdie offers. The data confirmed a lot of our beliefs and helped show us we were on the right track with our decisions of how to improve Birdie.

I always complete pop-up website tutorials

Users tend not to complete the onboarding tutorials they encounter. This was an issue we would have to deal with. How do we make an onboarding experience that the users would complete?

I find that pop-up tutorials are helpful

Another example of people are complex and paradoxical beings. They generally don’t complete the onboarding tutorials, yet they do find them helpful. This was reassuring. If we did a good job creating the onboarding feature, users would benefit from it.

I would be interested in a site that gives me the ability to…

This question was mainly a gauge to see if users were at least interested in the features that Birdie offers. The answer was a resounding yes. Users are definitely interested in benefiting from Birdie’s functionality.

Birdie’s Mission

The client’s stated goal for Birdie is to provide users a way to save time and frustration in choosing what to watch. Our research showed that almost 80% of users spend over 5 minutes trying to find something to watch. Birdie’s features are designed to decrease the amount of time spent and the conflicts casued when searching for something to watch with another person.

Quick and easy

Our research showed that users were not inclined to write reviews, but they were willing to leave ratings. With that in mind we designed a system that allows users to choose from prewritten responses when they leave a rating. All of the usability testing subjects reacted positively to this new feature.

ideation

After we used to the feature analysis to determine which features were our priority, we then as a team participated in a design studio to brainstorm possible prototype designs. In a design studio you all have a certain amount of time to sketch out your ideas for a basic layout. In this case we focused on the onboarding process, which the client expressed interest in and we determined was a feature that would help with user satisfaction.

LO-fi Prototypes

The Lo-Fi prototypes both focused on the new onboarding process we were designing for Birdie. Two of the main components of using Birdie involved “Chirps” (what Birdie calls a rate/review by the user) and the user’s “Flock” (what Birdie calls a user’s personal network of Birdie users) and neither of those terms were directly explained to the user.

Another one of the issues that the client needed help with was decreasing the user drop rate. We needed to find a way of incentivizing users to continue “Chirping.” I knew we should implement some kind of system of gamification for Birdie. The client was concerned about the unethical nature of some gamification systems, but the idea we came up with was a passive system that rewarded the user with a progressive series of bird icons. The more the user Chirped, the more icons they “earned.” The system didn’t require the user to do anything beyond the normal operations of the site, and only rewarded continue use, so we felt it wasn’t a problem ethically. Also, we had data that showed that users would be more interested in continuing to use Birdie if a system like the one we were proposing was present.

Usability Testing

Our research initially showed that people would be more likely to use Birdie on their phones. With that in mind I directed the design team to create both a desktop version and a native mobile app version. We virtually tested Lo-Fi Figma prototypes for both versions over Zoom. Over 80% of the users tested preferred the mobile version of the app, but that might have had something to do with the fact that the mobile version had a slightly higher level of fidelity. Regardless, we met as a team and discussed what our next steps should be, and even though I had been leaning towards trying to convince the client to transition to a mobile app my team helped me realize that the client wasn’t prepared to make that change. Creating a mobile app would hamper the client’s ability to casually share Birdie with new users. It also would involve a complete redesign of the code base, which isn’t something the client was prepared to do at that time.

We took the positive user feedback we received about the mobile version and incorporated those ideas into the desktop version.

Gamification

In anticipation of introducing the bird icons I added a question to the user surveys that asked the users to pick which they preferred the current feather icon which identified users that had Chirped at least twenty-five times and earned the title of “Super Birdie,” or a bird icon that I had created in Adobe Photoshop.

One of the more interesting results we discovered during usability testing the Lo-Fi prototypes was an unintended result of the bird icons. Most of the subjects first reaction to the term “Chirp” was to immediately think of “Tweets” and Twitter. The addition of the bird icons helped flush out a wider bird theme and made the participants react more positively to the terms Chirp and Flock.

Bird icons

Once the research showed that users preferred the bird icon I designed, I created a whole set of bird icons. I used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to create the bird icon set. The idea was to use the transition of the egg icon to the chick icon to walk users through the onboarding process. Also, I created an icon for profiles that haven’t uploaded a photo to use as a default photo.

Tree Sort

Using Optimal Workshop we designed and conducted a virtual tree sort to test the efficacy of the navigational system. At first glance, results did not bode well, but in reality, it wasn't a user issue, it was an issue with the test we designed. There are multiple ways for the user to find the correct answer on the page and we did not mark those are correct results. So in reality the users were at least 90% indirectly successful in all three tasks. The only reason users failed any of the tasks was by selecting "followers" instead of "following."

Hi-Fi Prototype

We presented the Hi-Fi prototype that was created on Figma to the client. She was very pleased with our work. After the client presentation, I went back and cleaned up the design and made some improvements. I made some small design changes, like adding a new chirp icon, rounding some corners, making sure everything was aligned consistently, and changing the menu tabs. I also added a few more pages to the prototype to make it better match the current website’s functionality.

You can find a clickable version of the prototype HERE or by clicking on the button to the right. ⭆