✦Critiq✦

Your new favourite community-driven review platform

An example of a typical review site structure

Initial research

What is the design problem?

In response to the design problem, we initiated research into the commonalities and issues that we noticed for existing websites and insights.

Gaining empathy from the audience

Survey

We moved to collecting primary research and began with a Google form survey. The team received 52 responses and came us statistical data and findings.

One on One Interviews

To collect more qualitative data, I was appointed to conduct one on one interviews with approved questions set by the team. We wanted to understand the thought process and behaviours of people in regard to review platforms. It was important that we delved into the ‘why or why not’ for questions that were also prompted into the survey. We began by asking about their personal interests in movies or games so that they are comfortable before easing them into our inquiries. Consent was asked for and given at the start of the interview.

Above is a snapshot from the interview video and to the right are the notes taken from the answers afterwards.

Journey Mapping & User personas

The team made a journey map to visualise the different areas of how people currently interact with review platforms. User personas were created to depict our target audience.

Insights

We gathered our findings to make insights by establishing themes within them. The five themes were:
- Usage of review platforms
- Trust in reviews
- Expectations and advice for our platform and its features
- Connection with community
- Motivation

From these insights, we established design opportunities related to each theme.

User task flow

With all research, analysis and ideation activities completed, we set about developing three user task flows that would form the basisof our low-fidelity prototype and testing. These were simple journeys we’d expect users to take when interacting with the platformat different stages of their experience, these being:

1. First using the site to try and find a movie, TV show or game review
2. Signing up to the site, personalising your profile and viewing another user’s profile
3. Writing a review and interacting with other users in the comments

Low Fidelity Prototypes

Garnering all our research and analysis, we devised some low fidelity prototypes. Starting with initial paper prototyping where we were able to test out a wide range of options before carefully choosing the layouts we wanted to take into digital prototyping. We then created those initial digital prototyping to act as a guide for our high fidelity prototype.

Initial Paper Prototyping

Low fidelity Digital prototype

Style Guide

This is the established style guide. Purple has a rarity, especially in comparison to existing review sites and the blue and yellow were chosen to compliment it. We wanted the website to be approachable and modern hence the rounded nature of the assets. Critique, our brand name, coincides with the intentions for everyone to deliver them. The word is close to 'critter' so we decided to exploit this resemblance in our branding.

Challenges

Hi Fidelity Prototype

The features of the review website were detailed in the report.