One-Inch Barrier

Working with Telescope Film, myself and three other master students worked together to explore the barriers of individuals who consume international content. We designed a solution to help increase international content awareness and consumption among those living in the United States who are interested in international content.

MY ROLE

Product Designer + Project Manager

PROJECT TYPE

Senior Capstone

TIMEFRAME

January 2022 - June 2022 (6 months)

PROJECT SUMMARY

Hollywood dominates the film industry on a global scale, which makes the

U.S. a difficult market for international film to enter. Yet, many notable

international films have achieved great success recently in the U.S. How might we get more people living in the U.S. to watch international content?

We created a mobile app solution which address increasing awareness and exposure to international content, lowering barriers to finding and accessing international content, and promote sharing and social engagement among the target audience.

THE CHALLENGE

With Hollywood dominating the film industry on a global scale, it's no surprise that watching international content is primarily access driven which depends on personal streaming platform access. Additionally, through our research, we found that availability and awareness of international content is shaped by word of mouth, social media, and streaming platform recommendations, watching patterns influence how international content is surfaced which means, watching less international content can lead to less exposure and lastly, international content is often lumped together and buried within streaming platforms with minimal relevant filtering options.

Taking the above findings into consideration for our target users--which consist of people living in the U.S. who are interested in international film and TV, we created a solution which address increasing awareness and exposure to international content, lowering barriers to finding and accessing international content, and promote sharing and social engagement among the users.

THE SOLUTION

Over 16 weeks, we employed a user-centered design process to discover and address barriers individuals experience with international film.

Process overview

Research

We conducted surveys, interviews comparative analysis and co-design focus groups to help us understand the users, their pain points, and their needs. Through our research, we discovered there was a film watching experience cycle, which points to three major parts of a users experience with international content. We decided to focus mainly on the biggest pain point, which was the "Awareness and Access" portion of the cycle.

Ideation

In response to our design goals, we brainstormed different ideas separately and narrowed down to 3 ideas based on feasibility for our sponsor and how well it addresses the problem.

We decided to proceed with the mobile app idea to tackle issues of low international content discoverability and awareness. A mobile app not only matches users current method of discovery via word of mouth and social media but also serves as a suitable medium for browsing international content media (e.g., trailers). An app aligns with our sponsor’s business goals and can draw more users to their platform. We proceeded to refine our mobile app idea by listing actions users should be able to complete with our solution and ideating on features our app can have to fulfill those requirements.

We organized ideas of our mobile app into three sections - discovery, social engagement, and logging. For each section, we sketched a few ideas, evaluated our ideas, and made a few key design decisions.

We listed key tasks our users should be able to complete in our design solution and picked the top three in relation to our goals. We created user scenarios surrounding our key tasks to add context and user flows for each task to list potential steps our user would need to take in accomplishing those tasks.

We mapped out the Information Architecture (IA) of our solution in order to determine the full content and functionality that would need to be included for each of the main flows that we had decided to pursue.

Prototype + Evaluation

With our user scenarios and IA in mind, we developed a prototype that covers each of the 3 key flows - passive surfacing of international content (video feed), active search of international content (discover), and promote sharing of international content (shared watchlists).

We conducted 2 rounds of usability testing with our prototype. Our usability goals include testing the functionality of our key features, evaluate the effectiveness of how those features introduce international content to users, and determine what kind of information users want to see about an international film.

Round 1 Findings (Above)

Round 2 Findings (Above)

Final Design

The final designs consist of four major sections of the mobile app, 1) Video Feed, 2) Discover Page, 3) Watchlists and 4) User Profile.

THE RESULTS

Next Steps

In addition to our final design, we provided to our sponsor a list of possible considerations for the future of the design. We prioritized the things that we weren’t able to include within the scope of our initial design, but would benefit future iterations of the app. They can be broken down into three categories: Technical Implementation, Social Engagement, and Gamification.

Reflection

Upon reflection, we decided as a team that there were three main takeaways from our experience working on this capstone project. Firstly, the project focus shift which was unexpected and can happen on any project, additional research can further improve our solution and decision making was a barrier but also a learning experience to help us build our skills for future projects.