Comprehensive Media PRofile

Mobile App Concept

As a UX team, we identified a problem space through researching people who consume various types of media. We learned that people who frequently media are faced with too much content, and lack of accuracy in recommendations.

After going going through the entire UX Process we developed a solution. Enter MUSE - a comprehensive approach to media recommendations that brings users closer to the content they love paired with related Medium articles.

My Role: UX Researcher/Designer

Duration: 2 Week Sprint (Jan 2024)

Tools: Figma, Maze, Notion, Keynote, Zeplin

Methods Used: User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Competitive Feature Analysis, Business Model Canvas, Persona & Journey Map, Feature Prioritization, Mobile Prototyping, Usability Testing, Task Flows, Sketching & Design Studio

WHat we set out to accomplish

Our UX team sought out to learn about people who actively consume various forms of media. Our insights from research allowed us to create a platform would aligned with the needs & goals of our target audience and solve the issues identified in the problem space.

Project Goals:

  • Provide more comprehensive approach to media recommendations

  • Use a wider base of content than competing platforms

  • Allow users to engage more meaningfully with content through related Medium articles

Design Opportunity:

  • Recommendations based on media consumption across multiple platforms, based on user inputted media rankings

  • Easy access to articles covering media consumed and related projects

  • Connect users with new and high-quality content that aligns with their preferences

Introducing…Muse!

Based on user testing and business analysis, we developed MUSE. Key functionality includes:

  • Connect disparate platforms

  • Curated recommendations based on user history

  • Develop personal media profile

  • Rate/Review media

  • Dive deeper with related Medium articles

design Process

MUSE allows users to access curated media recommendations in a single platform and surfaces relevant Medium articles to allow users to dive deeper into interesting topics.

How did we accomplish this? We followed the design process below:

Learning about the media Landscape

Goal of research

Learn more about the the media landscape and current users behaviors, needs, and goals.

Business Research

Competitive Feature Analysis + Medium Partnership

We created a competitive feature analysis to understand where Medium stands in the marketplace and considered which features Medium offers, in comparison to its current competitors. This allowed us to understand where Medium excels and opportunities for unique offerings and a partnership with MUSE.

Key Takeaways:

  • Medium writers are already creating content about media Muse seeks to promote

  • If more people are exposed to targeted Medium articles, they’ll want to subscribe

  • Networks and producers will have greater incentive to create sponsored content

Business Model Canvas

We used a BMC to analyze Medium’s business: partnerships, goals, values, and customer segments. By understanding these aspects of Medium, we see where Muse can add value to their existing customer base, and even expand it. 

Interviewing media consumers

  • Completed five user interviews

  • Target Audience: people who consume media daily on different platforms (books, social media, streaming)

  • Goal: uncover potential pain points and insights to inform our design.

  • Method: discussion guide with questions to validate or invalidate our assumptions.

Synthesizing interview data

We used affinity mapping to synthesize user interview data. We noted observations from interviews and grouped the insights by similarity to extract common themes, which we used to understand our target audience’s goals, needs, and pain points.

Key takeaways:

  • Let user play an active role in curating their recommendations

  • There’s opportunity for a comprehensive platform for pre and post research

  • People are interested in keeping a history of their consumption

Key Takeaways:

  • The market is primed for an app that relies on user inputted data 

  • Today’s users expect a high-level of customization in their online environment

  • Users want to have a voice, and interact socially online

Who are we designing for?

Persona

We created a persona - “Stephanie” to summarize our research, gain a visual understanding of the user, and focus our design efforts on ultimately solving the users's challenges. Based on the insights and direct quotes from our user interviews, we outlined our persona's goals, needs, and pain points. 

Journey Map

We created a user journey map to consider each step a user would take before, during, and after the experience of taking in content. We used Stephanie as an example, to humanize our user, and plot her emotional state and interaction with technology at each point in her experience.

How research shows up in our design

Using the actionable insights from research, we developed features that would directly align with each of the insights that we gathered. We used these design ideas when we are sketching and iterating in our design studio. Below are the key concepts that we extracted from research and how it shows up in our design:

designing the app

Product Principles

Before jumping into our design studio, our UX team established design principles that aligned with our values and provided a solid foundation for our platform, prior to developing features.

Prioritizing what Features to design

To kick off our design and ideation phase, we used two techniques to prioritize features while keeping in mind the constraints of limited resources. These exercises helped us to understand what features were high priority vs. low priority, and what already existed within the app.

Must Have Features

  • Onboarding process

  • Browse related content 

  • Rate content for platform recommendations

  • Bookmark content for later  

  • Mark content as viewed  

Getting our ideas out on paper

Our team conducted a design studio session to get our ideas onto paper and collaborate on our design using our user & business research, persona/journey map, and product principles as reference.

Key Takeaways:

  • Users will be given topic chips in onboarding

  • Global navigation will be on bottom and include profile, recommendations, and search

  • When titles are referenced they will be accompanied by a thumbnail for a better visual experience

Mid-Fidelity to hi-fidelity Usability testing

Overview:

  • 2 rounds of testing - 10 total users (5 users for mid-fi, 5 users for hi-fi)

  • Method: Wrote tasks + test script; Measured users on time to complete task, easiness rating, and path to completing the task

  • Goal: Understand the usability of our current features to then make improvements to our design

Using insights from usability testing on our mid-fi prototype, we iterated on our design and applied the changes highlighted below as we developed our prototype from mid-fi to hi-fi.

The improvements in usability from mid-fi to hi-fi on each task are shown below. Due to the changes we made based on user data from round 1 of testing, users were able to navigate through the hi-fi prototype more quickly and with more success than the mid-fi design.

How did these design changes affect usability?

High-Fidelity Prototype

After receiving feedback and analyzing the results from during our first round of user testing on our mid-fi prototype, we applied these changes to our hi-fi wireframes. We added annotations that have the related user tasks that a user would take action on each screen. 

Creating Account

Using Content Recommendations

Style Guide

We created a style guide to standardize Muse’s design in alignment with our product principles. We used the guidelines to standardize a system of components to create a consistent visual appearance throughout each screen and version of the app’s development.

Additional Product Highlights

View User Profile & Search For Content

Onboarding

Rating Titles & Adding to Watch History

Technical notes and next steps

API Information

In order to offer a feature rich experience and lower the amount of data to handle, we needed to consider API integrations, such as:

  • TMBD - extensive catalog of movies and series, including thumbnails, titles, synopsis, cast, keywords, trailers.

  • Medium - allow our application to display and recommend Medium articles related to the media they are viewing as well as populate article details such as title, excerpts, author, author photo and article cover.

  • GoodReads - used to populate book fields, including images, title, author, synopsis.

KPIs

We used the Google Heart Framework in order to identify how we want to measure the quality of user experience. In order to evaluate the success of our design, we wanted to focus on following metrics as it relates to MUSE:

  • Engagement - session frequency (time spent within the platform + number of log ins), interacting with content

  • Adoption - existing users referring their friends to the platform + conversion rates from referrals

  • Retention - length of user account history + deleting accounts/leaving accounts dormant

Next Steps

Looking forward to our short and long term goals, we would prioritize the following next steps as we continue to evolve our product strategy:

  • Additional Rounds of User Testing + Pilot Program

  • Onboarding tutorial for new users

  • Develop Andriod + Desktop design