Project Background
At the dawn of the smartphone era, as mobile video consumption shifted from flip-phones and carrier-controlled marketplaces to Youtube and Vimeo through mobile browsers, production companies that had built their business on platform exclusivity lost much of their leverage.
The client for this project contracted me to help develop a potential solution to that problem, a whitelabeled solution that could be shopped around to those production houses as a brandable way to present their body of work without it being commingled with unrelated content that might draw users away.
Role & Team
For this project I served as a UI/UX Designer. I worked with a Visual Designer as well as a pair of App Developers (one for iOS, one for Android versions of the app) to bring the designs to digital life.
Design Process
- Help users find videos through curation and search
- Allow users to rate and favorite videos
- Facilitate video sharing on social media
Project research and discovery consisted mainly of the following:
- Market Research - I reviewed currently available platforms performing the same sort of functions as the product we were planning, making note of common functions, controls, layouts, and other design choices. Decisions were made largely to expand the potential of the product by allowing for as many different functions as needed
- Stakeholder & Potential User Interviews - I met multiple times with different stakeholders involved in the project to gauge what they found to be most important, balancing business needs with user needs while working to preserve the core value proposition of the poroduct.
The workflow remained fairly simple throughout the design and development process, relying on a central interaction loop that reinforced users flow from one piece of content to the next. This is the same sortr of loop that would later be popularized by apps such as TikTok and Instagram.
UI ideation was somewhat tricky, as we had to provide something that was easy to re-style for clients according to their brand standards. We ended up using an approach that gave the product a fictional compay's brand and coloration, allowing us to introduce it as a sort of living demo of the product.
My final deliverable, these mockups take the approved layout and the approved color scheme and bring the two together in the final plan for the look and feel of the product.
Outcome
The product was a success according to KPIs including time spent watching partner videos, referral rate, viral sharing and overall partner satisfaction.
Image Gallery
