Background
MTV Taiwan decides to launch their own app with news/video/vote features as a marketing tool for their original website contents. This is a platform for the fans to keep follow their favorite stars and their up-to-date life. Fans can also interact with the stars with the social network features within this app.
Demo app : iOS Android (However, because of business issues, the app was not allowed to be published without the headquarter’s authorization.)
Design Role
- User Experience Design (UX)
- User Interface Design (UI) – 1st version
Timeline
May., 2015~ Jul., 2015
Challenges
Before going into any details, as the UX designer, I tried to clarify MTV team’s ideas of this product because at first they were not really confirmed with the product direction. The team is happy to accept new concepts but did not have enough experiences and ideas of it. Therefore, I spent many time on clarifying their expectations for the product with different mockups and prototypes. Convincing people with different backgrounds is quite a big challenge for me since I have to learn how to communicate them with more informal language.
Sitemap & Wireframe
Generally, the team expected the App to be a marketing tool of their current website, since they already have loyal users. However, since it is a cross-industry project for the team, the design process is hardly to be proper, but with more ambiguity and chaos. As a result, I tried to communicate with them step by step with the designed sitemap and wireframe.
Sitemap
Low-fidelity Wireframes
Launch & Login
Users can select to register or login on one page. The simple design is without further annoying transitions. The interface will automatically transfer with the function selected.
Category
Home Page
Member
The team expects the app to be more sociable but with limited time for development. Therefore, before adding the social networking features, a simple member’s page is designed to let users view the content they liked and to set the basic personal information. The social network feature is expected to add in the 2nd stage.
Achievement & Reflection
The design process is actually quite new to the organization since they are in the media industry, without abundant software design experience. As a result, I not only had to take charge of the whole design process from user experience research, interface design, and interaction design, but also need to communicate the basic ideas of GUI design to people from different industries. The communication took quite a long time and my suggestions would influence the team’s major direction.
- Collect members’ data, preference and feedback.
- Promote the current MTV stars and events on the mobile platform.
- Increase the interaction between stars and fans through the in-app live shows.
- Enhance the loyalty and stickiness of the current users with social networks.
Until now, the app is still under development because of some organizational issues. Generally speaking, this project is more start-up style due to its uncertainty and possibility. It is actually quite interesting to work with people from varied backgrounds and useful to get the solid information from the in-house partners when you are exploring the user cases and scenarios and during the design process.
