Background
Netflix invests in creating and giving a third-party platform to stories that connect people and cultures from around the world. Imagine this product can help the families and friends share their experience with content such as series television shows and movies they love... My task is to design a platform where the community can celebrate shared stories together through communal and authentic experiences.
Our solution
Do you miss movie nights during a lockdown? Sharemo is a desktop app that allows users to watch content together remotely and privately. Users can easily start watch parties and engage in real-time conversations before, during and afterward the parties. They can also get a unique and memorable review at the end of the watch.
prototype made by ningyue
Process
Secondary Research
User Interview
Journey Mapping
Actionable Insights
Crazy 8’s Ideation
Prioritizing
Sitemap
Sketch
User Testing
Wireframe
Prototype
Empathize & Define
What do people use to hold virtual watch parties now and what's wrong?
Netflix Party is what most people use to hold virtual watch parties nowadays. It is a third-party plugin for web browsers. Anyone with a Netflix account can join a watch party via a link. Members can synchronize the video, playback, and text-chat on a side panel. However, there are some problems with it.
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Users can just type, no video or audio
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Can't get full-screen if you want to chat.
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Can't explore other videos on Netflix while using Netflix Party
“It works but I feel like we are just watching at the same time, for me and my buddies, it lacks interaction and engagement. ”
Contextual Analysis
I talked with of my friends who likes watching movies / TV series and had the experience of attending virtual movie parties. 2 of them watched with family and 3 of them watched with friends. I tried not only to gather pain points from the journey but also to look for new opportunities of the online mode.
5
What they expect-
What they actually get-
“We bet on the TV shows like the Voice, we dressed up and took selfies. Now I'm in another city. Really miss my family watch party!”
“The good thing is we can have a virtual party any time, in our own houses, and it's never late to ask others to join. ”
How might we...
Throw a party easily
Muitiple ways to create / join / retrieve a watch party. Show friends who are available and recommend movies according to shared interests.
Quick
Stimulate interesting interaction / conversation
Gamify the watch experience to encourage all the users join the discussion, share their feelings and opinions. Text+Audio+Video.
Engaging
Make each party unique and memorable
Prompt subjective and objective topics according to the plots. Customized room and experience for each watch party.
Immersive
Ideate & Design
Run a Crazy Eights session to generate crazy design ideas!
Since time is very limited, we have to brainstorm in couple of hours. We applied the crazy eights sessions to make members generate as many ideas as possible.
Supplies: Paper/screen, pens, sticky 'dots'
Process:
Ask the everyone to sketch 8 quick ideas in 8 minutes
Ask people to present their top three ideas to the group
Give people more time to sketch out their three favourite ideas further
Ask people to present further ideas to the group
Give everyone 3 sticky dots to vote on their favourite ideas out of the whole group
One of my 8s
After the final voting, we decided on the priority of all the ideas we generated. We would focus on the top ideas 'Multiway Start', 'Guess Game', and 'Edge of Glory'. We would develop other ideas based on how much time we have.
Develop key scenarios and complete the whole story
Based on these selected features, we tried to streamline the user story. After that, we developed the site map and focused on designing interfaces about key scenarios.
Sitemap
Iterate & Finalize
I took the interfaces of key scenarios to users for Improvement
Though we just have very rough screens, we decided to run a user test to validate our design. We took a set of wireframe screens (which represents three key scenarios) to three users. To our surprise