College + Netflix
Adobe Creative Jam
TIMELINE
June 22 2020 – June 26 2020
48 Hours
MY ROLE
UX/UI Designer + Presenter
THE TEAM
Nicole Freeman & Calvin Norwood
TOOLS
Adobe Xd
OVERVIEW
Brief & Problem Statement
Design a third-party desktop web site or desktop app (not Netflix-branded) where the community can celebrate shared stories together through communal and authentic experiences.
About the Creative Jam
Adobe partnered with Netflix to create a 48 hour design sprint where 800 teams from across the country competed to design an innovative solution that addressed the brief and a target audience. At the end of the competition 10 finalists were chosen to present their work live and receive feedback from top designers at Netflix.
PROCESS
Brainstorming/Ideation
Our team decided very quickly that we wanted to address social issues in our solution. We believed this would be an impactful and meaningful solution to the problem. We wanted to specifically target young adults as an audience because we felt many young adults want to get involved and learn more, but need a more meaningful way to do so besides social media.
The Problem
Young adults need a place to learn about important social issues and engage with a community that can help them build knowledge and have difficult conversation about important social problems.
Understanding Users
We developed two personas, Emily and John, to represent our target users and help identify their pain points. The primary persona, Emily, is someone who is not very familiar with social issues, but is open-minded and wants to learn more. The secondary persona, John, is already more knowledgeable about social issues, but wants to participate in a collaborative platform to learn more.
THE SOLUTION
We created Watch & Learn, a shared streaming platform for young adults to learn more about social issues they are passionate about, and those that they have little exposure to. Users can explore and expand their perspectives through movies and television shows within a diverse community by creating and joining watch parties that offer interactive features to have meaningful conversations with others, and resources to take action. These shared stories allow users to create understanding through authentic experiences, and build upon them through recommended and personally curated content.
Affinity Diagram
Using our personas we created an affinity diagram to identify what potential users would need and want from the product.
Competitive Analysis
Next we looked at existing products in order to further define the structure and features of our desktop application. These are some of the applications we took inspiration from.
- Netflix Party – chat feature during the movie
- Slack Desktop App – sidebar navigation
- TEDx – personal recommendations and overall theme to media
- Discord – AI bot to moderate conversations
- Twitch – dark mode and color scheme
User Flow
We then created a user flow diagram to map out how users would navigate through the product.
Low-Fidelity Prototyping
Using our research we moved into the low-fidelity pen and paper prototype phase. We each created prototypes and then combined the best of each one in order to move into our high-fidelity design.
High-Fidelity Prototyping
Next we moved onto high fidelity prototyping. Using our research and sketches our teammate Nicole designed a basic template structure of the pages and navigation. This streamlined the process for designing multiple pages I primarily worked on the chat feature and the count down to the watch party as well as creating social issue categories and finding movies for them.
RESULTS & REFLECTION
This was the first Creative Jam for all the members of our team. We wanted a way to practice our skills and learn new ones at the same time. We learned how to work quickly, but still produce a usable project. Since it was our first Creative Jam we had no expectations as far as placing and focused on having fun and creating a project we were proud of. Out of 612 teams, our team “You Otter Iterate” placed in the top 10 and we were chosen to present our project to the Netflix judges for feedback!
I was chosen to present our project live to an audience of about 1,000 people. This was a great experience because I got to learn how to quickly summarize the key points of a project.
When reflecting on the project our team decided we could have allocated our time differently. Since this was our first design sprint we tackled similarly to other projects with a lot of time spent planning. However, with such a quick project this made it so we had to cut out some of the collaborate features we wanted to include.
Overall, it was a great experience and we hope to do another Creative Jam together soon!