The Critics App

Everyone loves watching movies, but the process of finding a good movie to watch on streaming devices is often a frustrating experience. Presenting The Critics App, a one stop shop for all your movie needs. All you do is login into the app and connect all your streaming devices in the application. Based on your viewed movies, recommendations are provided. You can connect with your friends and create movie listsing, watch parties, engage in forums, chat live, use a tie breaker when you cannot decide which movie to watch. The Critics App, improving the social experience of choosing a movie.

The Goal Tree formed the base of the project and led to exploring new ideas and debugging issues with respect to the functionaities. By focus setting with the help to team brainstorming, six foci were choosen for interviews namely, Deciding factors, Platofrom preference, Movie Serch criteria, Movie search time, Recommendations, and Social deciding factors. Semi-structured interviews paved way to finding answers to the set foci. The interviews were then analyzed by team members by interpreting the important key pharses and diagrams like Identity model, Day in a life model, Relationship Model, Physical Model, and Sequence Model.


What did we learn from the interviews?

We understood behaviour patterns of our target audience like importance of ratings, trailers, crew members, genres, and recommendations.

Did we change our focus?

We found out that watch movies was more of a social activity and users would not mind watching movies they dont like. This led to introducing a community build aspect to the application providing an avenue for social interactions with people with similar interests.



Next, we created four product concepts prototypes based on Ideation Process. The first step of the ideation process is a list of Hot ideas and issues were constructed from our interview notes, diagrams, and affinity models. Vissions were made of how these Hot Ideas would be applied using the relationship model.

Persona's and Story Boards

Person's are a great way to understand how different users will interact with our system. Using these persona's, scenario's were created how each persona would interact with the system. StoryBoards provide a graphical representation of these scenario's of the application. StoryBoard That was used to create the use cases. Lastly, Wireframes were created in balsamiq with the help of the product concepts generated.


Wireframes/Transition Network

Wireframe Features - Party/Tie breaker


Once all Wireframes were done we conducted Think Aloud Tests with stakeholders and Usability Testing using Jacob Neilsons Hueristics. Usability testing was carried out by our entire team as well as classmates. The identified issues were then implemented to inculcate seamless functionality.

Wireframing Tools

What did I learn ?

Teamwork
Brainstorming gets better ideas on the table and makes solutioning an easier process.

Contextual Inquiry is important
Interpretation session led to a deeper understanding our users which I felt was one of the mos important step in this project.

Usability Testing
Jacon Neilson's 10 principles are very helpful in finding bugs in the system we could solve several issues during our first round of testing. Also an additional set of eyes from our classmates helped solve many debugging problems. This helped us refine our Wireframes in a more efficient way.