Project
Research and plan for Tribal III, a nonprofit, to enter the streaming market
UX/UI Design Intern
1 Project Manager, 2 Designers
Apr. 2020 - May. 2020
UX Strategy Project @ Tribal III
Tribal III is a nonprofit aim to help young film workers boosting their early career by providing mentorship, affordable space, and equipment. To make full usage of their existing resources, Tribal III was planning to develop a subscription streaming service that enables users to support filmmakers directly.
My role in the team is to explore the needs of users further, provide UX strategic advice, and design the structure of a cross-platform streaming service for Tribal III to evaluate project cost.
After several meeting with the management team, the design team realized that the project was based on hypotheses. To make sure the user needs exist, design team asked for a week to conduct researches about users to dig more in-depth on how we can support them.
To further explore the needs of both filmmakers and audiences and to seek opportunities for the new product. Design team conducted 6 interviews with young filmmakers. During the interview, participants were asked about their film career, behavior using streaming services, and their concerns as filmmakers uploading videos to streaming services.
They need money or access to equipment to develop their early career.
They want their works to be seen by professionals.
They want to know more people in the industry and opportunities to work with them.
Aside from interviews, I looked into 4 existing streaming services interviewees mentioned, including Netflix, Youtube, Quibi, and Vimeo. During the research, I focused on whether users' needs are fulfilled, how they showcase the videos, as well as how they integrate social features.
From the research, I noticed that most of the competitors do not fulfill young filmmaker's needs. However, Vimeo did have a very similar feature with Tribal Network. To compete with it, Tribal III could take advantage of its own network to provide more personalized services and enable the direct donate feature.
Through the preliminary research, we noticed that current streaming services could only partially fulfill young filmmakers' needs to connect with professional groups, seek inspiration from a professional platform, and support their financial needs.
With these findings in mind, we had a more accurate goal on what features to develop and to prioritize.
Take advantage of Tribal's network to build a professional community.
Accept submissions and review them on quality perspective.
Enable audiences to support filmmakers by fast donating directly.
While the management team did not have a clear plan on the project scale and the resources needed to develop the application, we organized the concept provided for further strategic planning.
In this part, the management team provided us dozens of planned features as a list. To keep everything organized, we created an affinity diagram to group the elements into pages based on features and comparative analysis.
We created a sitemap indicating pages that we have to develop. It served as a reference for the management team to estimate the time and resources needed for this product. Also, it gave us a clear indication of where we were in the developing process.
* Click on the sitemap to see the full-sized version on Figma
From the interviews, the young filmmakers told us that although they thought the donation feature would be great, they would not expect it to be very helpful in terms of their financial situation. In contrast, they were seeking for opportunities to be part of a filming team and to be seen. So, the design team advised to embedded community features or a gig board to make connections between the professionals and the young filmmakers were essential to support our target audiences.
At the beginning, the management team planned to publish the first version of the Tribal Network application in 3 months from scratch. We provided a more detailed structure of the application and advised the management team to adjust the schedule accordingly.
Realized that Tribal III is trying to maintain their operation with the subscription fee from the streaming service, we advised to prioritize the video and signup/login features at the first phase and develop other features step by step in the future.
