A mobile application for users to read alternative plot ideas, write and publish alternate plot ideas. Designed with three major goals increasing engagement, making it effortless and bringing in aestheticity.
Roles & Responsibilities
UX Research: Research Lead
Design : Design Lead
Project Context
2020
Curiosity Exploration Case Study
Tools Used
Figma
Notion
Miro
Everyone watches movies and reads books, it’s one of the most fun things ever to do, but everyone is not satisfied by what they watch or read. Certain plot lines or incidents are not equally accepted and people would want something else to happen.
Who doesn’t remember the fiasco at the end of the Game of Thrones, right? It was such a huge disappointment. But where can viewers/readers vent out their frustration? Where can they express what they wanted to happen and receive some support to their views? Fictional worlds are so huge, I believe that “the creators create a world with history and future, regale us with tales or a minute part of the presence and leave the rest out”.
Every alternate plot could help in filling the world with more tales and people need a platform that addresses their basic needs so that they could concentrate on “What would have happened”
The purpose of my mobile app is to allow users to write alternative plot ideas for movies, books and series on a platform that gives them a sense of identity and great user experience.
How might we allow users to express alternative plot ideas that fulfils them and requires the least amount of effort and at the same time, imbues them with a sense of identity with the plots they work on.
The primary focus was on people who would want to express their alternative plot ideas on the internet. Similarly I also included people who also wanted to read such alternative plot ideas. I did not think targeting on specific demographics would be useful, because virtually audience in all demographies take part in such activities.
With this initial understanding, I wanted to see if there were people like me further, and if they were I wanted to look at alternative plots from their perspective. With the intention of understanding the motivations people have and the pain points that stop them from dealing with alternative plots, I went into user research
There were already platforms in the market whose working was similar to what I had in mind, the major goal was to analyse them from the user perspective and figure out how to make my platform unique and usable. For this, I chose to do both qualitative and quantitative research for the study.
The motivation to do a quantitative study was primarily linked to understanding the prevalence of the problem and user enthusiasm to engage in the platform I was working on. I ran a survey on google forms and shared it on my social accounts asking friends to fill it and further share it. It’s here.
I received 50 replies to the form and a general summary of the insights are below.
87% respondents felt they wanted to change a plot in a movie/series/book.
More than 95% felt they wanted to do it more than once.
72% showed interest to use a platform where they can write alternative plots.
And a shocking (for me) 50% were willing to provide the ideas for someone else to develop and write.
These responses from the quantitative study validated my idea and offered me some great insights that showed me a few directions for my qualitative studies.
I chose 6 people who satisfied the basic requirement of watching movies and wanting to write alternate plots, and I conducted interviews with them.
The interview questions were chosen from the following themes
The experience that users had in writing alternate plot stories.
The pain points they had in previous sites they had used.
Expectations from such sites.
The difficulties they face when writing alternative plots.
Features that could further could increase engagement, satisfaction and motivation for users
As this was a semi-structured interview, I asked multiple questions based on the above themes probing when required, we also had great talks about disappointing plot lines and how we would change them!:)
We talked to over 15 individuals who migrated from countries like china and India to other countries, each had a different story and a different reason and everyone had faced many hardships in their initial days.
Talking with 6 enthusiastic participants gave me lots of information to filter. I used affinity mapping and prioritisation techniques to get to the few insights that would have an impact. I ended up with 3 major insights
Insight 1 - Not everyone is a writer
Everyone having alternative plot ideas would not have the time or ability to develop, write and publish them.
Insight 2 - Existing platform are bland
Existing platform lack motivation, appeal and most importantly do not appreciate ideas or give a sense of identity.
Insight 3 - Users hesitate to put in the effort.
For multiple reasons users hesitate to create a blog, write down the whole story and publish it, especially the mental faculties make it harder for them to get down and do stuff
Gaining such valuable insights from the research , I delved into turning those insights into features. I began with How Might We questions.
The process of answering these how might we questions was the most interesting phase in all of the research and I ended up with a bunch of features and three major features.
Major Feature - 1 : Share ideas and pick ideas randomly
Allowing users who have alternate ideas but cannot develop them to share a snippet of the idea or the scene so that other interested people can develop it.
Major Feature - 2 : Redefining the User Interactions and organisation.
Bringing a newer prominence by categorising based on fictional worlds and characters, thus offering users a sense of belonging.
Major Feature - 3 : Redefining the approach to alternative plots by removing blogs and embracing a question answer approach.
Allowing users to answer to questions of what would have happened, multiple users to express their opinions on interested plots. This removes the mental effort involved in creating a blog post, it’s as simple as choosing a question and writing down their view in a line or even a 1000 lines
I used it to ideate the entire flow of the application without in a minimal amount of time and effort.
With a clear idea from the Information Architecture, I moved onto the low fidelity designs to gain something tangible so that I could verify and validate my process sofar.
I ran this low fidelity mockup through a set of guided usability testings and received some interesting feedback based on which I redid the designs. Among the various insights I received, I have listed the 3 i felt to be most significant.
After redefining the low-fidelity and a couple more user testings, the following solution is what I arrived at.
It was an overall illuminating experience for me, and as this was the first UX project I worked on it taught me a lot. User research was fun and design was equally fun and illuminating. Most importantly I learnt not to make any assumptions and try to talk to people before doing stuff.
I realised that people inspite of having busy lives, would take some time to employ their creative selves, and when this is appreciated and reciprocated by the platforms they engage in it would be a resulting experience for everyone.
Finally, I was able to build an application that makes it easier, engaging and rewarding for users to write and publish alternative plot stories, it was fun to work on the project and I learnt a lot. Especially broadening the problem from my perspective to a general perspective and then narrowing it back to focus on what’s important was something enlightening. It taught me how the same problem appears different when viewed from different glasses. The final application addresses a few major pain points faced by users engaging in canonical fiction.