WEBSITE APPLICATION DESIGN

CARL CRITERION COMPANION

PLATFORM: WEBSITE

BACKGROUND

ABOUT CRITERION

The Criterion Collection has diverse movies, but many people are unaware of movies that are not foreign or old. Most people have seen at least one classic movie from Criterion.

In this project, I redesigned a new feature for the Criterion Collection website to appeal to a wider, new audience.

CHALLENGE

How might we design an interactive product for millennials (18-40) to discover new, interesting movies through personalized recommendations?

Movie watchers feel that the  Criterion Website currently

  • has a lot of movies, but no way to pick them.
  • does not have much interaction.
  • has an odd choice of famous people's Top 10 movies list.

HELLO, DERRICK.

After 20+ interviews and 40+ survey responses, the user was identified as movie watchers between 18-40.

KEY RESEARCH TAKEAWAYS

Movie watchers :

  • valued blogs and reviews highly in picking movies.

  • had trusted friend(s) with good taste recommend movies.

  • generally wanted to see "good quality" movies.

To address these takeaways, my sketches focused on creating an experience that would connect users to trusted friends or sources to find an enjoyable movie

WHAT IS THE CRITERION COLLECTION

Researching the Problem

Initially, an empathy map was created to step into the mind of the user. The empathy map was focused into an affinity map, of which I developed topics to focus my interview questions. 25 interview questions were created that focused on 4 main topics: Motivations, External Factors, Internal Factors, and Initial Thoughts in choosing movies.

To learn more about how I could improve the Criterion Collection experience, I interviewed users between 18-40  about the brand. Users were movie watchers and considered themselves to have good taste in films.

FROM INTERVIEWS

  • "Who exactly are the Criterion Collection? What do they do?

  • "Aren't all their movies black and white and 50 years old?"

  • "That's the stuff my 75-year old stepdad watches."

Key Findings

INITIAL DESIGNS

7 paper sketches were created. The MVP paper prototype was tested with users and further developed into digital wireframes. These digital wireframes were used for 10+ usability tests.

DESIGN DECISIONS

FINAL DESIGNS

When a user first clicks on CARL, she can type in a movie, genre, director or actor and get a recommendation. The user doesn't have to log in or create a Top 10 list because Carl's recommendations are based on existing film influencers' Top 10 lists. 

CARL has a great memory and can store the user's Criterion movie browsing history to generate "Carl's picks for you" and show Top 10 lists from "People with similar taste".' 

*Some images belong to the Noun Project and have a Creative Commons license.