What is Wewatch?
Wewatch is a third party app that targets people who separate with family or friends and want to share a film together. By real-time sharing and interacting, people still can celebrate a common content across physical distance and jet lag to promote communication and enhance relationships.
The story behind: Build
• Under Covid-19 quarantine, communication and activities turn into remotely, a bunch of digital products emerge in the market, and people are trying to explore more interactive and fun ways to connect with others.
• Netflix cooperates with Adobe, starts the Creative Jam competition, invests in creating and giving a platform to stories that connect people and cultures from around the world. In this competition, participants are required to 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.
Sponsor
Adobe Creative Jam & Netflix
Role
User Research, UI/UX Design, Visual Design, User Testing
Team
Mingyue Qu, Vincent Mou
Design challange
How might we help families and friends utilize this platform and share their experience with content they love?
Design principle
Create a watch content that can share with family and friends remotely and privately
Create anticipation by scheduling watch parties easily and effectively
Engaging in realtime conversations before, during, or afterwards
Create a clean and easy to use the platform to engage users in the experience
Final Solution
Schedule a party
This feature allows users to schedule a film party by choosing a film and a specific time, then to share the film party request to friends list, which not only enables the privacy of sharing, but also makes both scheduling and sharing action easily and accessible all in one platform.
Upcoming Events
Users can check and join the scheduled party in this feature. After joined, all party members realtime videos will show up at the top. The realtime engagement and communication becomes effective through the function.
Video effect filter
Users are able to choose film character filters during the realtime video. The filter provides more privacy and fun to realtime communication and interaction.
Chat & About functions
Users can type during the film in Chat section, after the film, they are able to check the chatting history in the below to review the conversation. Also there’s About function in the page which provides the film intro, character lists, related resources link and video to the film. The Chat & About sections offer user multiple ways to communicate, more accessible information and resources that they can share with each other effectively.
In-film View
During the full screen film, users can still use video filter and Chat functions. The chatting conversion will popup under the user’s video which clearly shows who is typing and at the same time will not affect the real-time video communication.
Process
Research
What did we do?
competitive research
Qualitative research
Journey map
Competitive Research
We researched the current watching platforms such as Netflix and Youtube and checked through the reviews and comments left by users. The crucial feedback helped us to identify various pain points.
Key Findings
• There’s no related articles or resources to the video, which reduces the learnability of the platform.
• Sharing content takes user several steps to finish which is time consuming.
• Completion is not obvious enough, and the information within one page is overwhelming, which brings lots of distraction.
Qualitative Research
We conducted surveys and in-person interviews with a group of people who use watching platform, in order to understand their behaviors, thoughts, pain points and insights about watching film with others remotely.
Key Findings
Under quarantine, watching films remotely with others becomes a routine for many people to maintain social life.
The real-time engagement and conversation are the most important factors when people watch film with family and friends.
Keeping the watching space and conversation private is important for users to express their thoughts during the film.
People would like to search for the background information or film analysis to understand the film and to have different perspectives.
Challenge here
We tried to understand the most important value for people when watching a film with others remotely. As a result, we found out that people watch film remotely together to share and enjoy the time with each other. Surprisingly, based on what most interviewees mentioned, choosing an ideal film is not as important as we thought, but scheduling the time is the crucial factor to do it successfully.
User Journey Map
Based on previous research, we created a user’s actions, feelings and thoughts through a time line which separated into three stages in order to describe the process that the user accomplish the goal with the product.
Design Opportunities
Before watching a film: How might we help users to start a watch party quickly and effectively?
During the film: How might we create a watching environment which is private, interactive and fun?
After the film: How might we provide the content which can be explored and shared?
Initial Wireframe
User Test
Iteration
How did we iterate to address the final design?
• Rethink the visual design of the template
• Redesign the schedule party flow
• Create interactions in fullscreen mode.
Wireframe
In main changes in the new wireframe are the Party Scheduling process and Interactions. In the Party Scheduling part, we reduced users' steps to schedule a party and create a more intuitive way to share with friends. In interactions, we added in-film fullscreen Interactions for users to enjoy the fun features.
Redesigned features
Party Scheduling
In-film fullscreen Interactions
Visual Design
How to provide users with succinct and clear experience without information overwhelming is one of our major focuses. After secondary research I found that when it contains much information in one page, light background color can help reduce the visual distraction. The light mode leads to better performance most of the time and overall better ability to focus on details without tiring the eyes.
Logo
In the light mode we make the logo color obvious and put it as nav button at the top of the page so that user can quickly go back to the home page.
