Netflix remains one of the most popular streaming services across the world and continues to dominate the streaming market to date, there is a critical flaw that has been exposed by the lockdown of COVID — no real way to watch movies or shows as a distributed group. Our team has attempted to fix the problem.
Overview
Role: UX Researcher, Interaction Designer
Team: Carrie Liu, David Kolomiyets
Tools: Figma, Slack, Monday.com, Zoom, Trello
Timeline: 2 week sprint
I was tasked to find the solution for the national favorite that will allow users to watch movies and shows together, and connect from different locations. Note: This project was in line with the educational program of the General Assembly UX Design Immersive.
Stage - Discover: Interviews/C&C Analysis
We wanted to begin by understanding users’ needs and goals. We've conducted 15 user interviews. In order to refine all of the data our team used affinity mapping as a way to discover trends and main pain-points.
Interviews findings:
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Some users feel that they have lost their bonds with friends and family
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Watching a movie alone feels depressing
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Lots of users said that they would love to do virtual parties or movie nights;
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Hulu or Disney Plus Watch Party didn’t have a video feature, only chat. It didn’t feel like they were watching a movie together
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Most of the interviewers want to see their friends’ reaction, hear their laugh, and simply be able to talk and comment while watching a movie as If they were sitting next to each other
Stage - Discover:
C&C Analysis
Analyzing our competitors and comparators helped us to identify the market, compare similar feature on the competitor's platforms and find places for improvement. We used Hulu, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime, Netflix Party as main competitors because these platforms have recently implemented community streaming feature.
The features were not found within the competitor’s platform:
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Video option,
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Failed to allow the host to start and end a movie at the same time, pause a movie for the group.
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No public watching
Zoom and Skype, as these applications are mainly focused on video telephony and online chat, gave us inspiration for design, layout and common features used for teleconferencing such as having bottom navigation, position of video screens above the movie, chat box on the right side of the screen.
Stage - Define:
User Persona
Stage - Define:
User Persona
Next step was to create a persona based upon main trends that we discover using affinity mapping. Our persona Raphael supervised us in every step the process, which also helped us keep the objective in focus.
Problem Statement
We need to strengthen the interaction between people and create an experience that will feel real when it comes to virtual movie nights because lack of connectedness during a pandemic left users feeling deprived and disconnected.
Stage - Develop:
Designing
In this stage each member of the team sketched and shared low-fi solutions based on users’ needs along with features that competitors were lacking.
After we sketched our solutions, the best ideas were implemented in medium-fidelity wireframes.
Stage - Develop:
Usability Tests
After we finalize our wireframes we conducted usability tests with users. Users had to start a party, pick a movie, invite friends, use screen’s options such as extend/minimize the screen, hide friends’ video screens and end the party. We conducted 6 usability tests that allowed us to gain deeper understanding through a combination of both qualitative and quantitative information.
Overall feedbacks from usability tests were positive, users loved our design, felt just like Netflix and user flow was smooth and no errors. However, the part where friends accept an invitation was missed that helped us to add a new feature that let users see who accepts an invitation. It was confusing for the most users as they didn’t know when to start a movie unless they knew who was going to join them.
Insights:
'Very cool, easy and simple navigation”
‘Overall is a very great and intuitive”
‘How do I know if they accepted my invitation”
All the mid-fi usability findings were implemented into a high fidelity prototype, such as adding a notification that allows users to see who is accepting an invitation.
From the high-fidelity usability test, we obtained the following insights:
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Users wanted to add a friend from the movie room
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The mute button was missing.
