Synergy
Adobe Creative Jam x MTV entry
Received honourable mention (Top 20)
Created in Adobe XD
Creative Brief provided by MTV can be found here: https://www.creativejam.in/mtv
The Prompt
Provided by MTV
"Music, pop culture, and historical events have served as landmarks to our life’s moments and childhood memories. Songs, movies and TV, and popular trends have strong connections to cultural milestones and sharing them helps us tell the stories related to interests and meaningful causes in our lives. Draw on that passion to empower individuals to do good and bring light to their favorite causes, from their mobile phone.
Your challenge is to design a mobile app that empowers an individual to encourage advocacy among their network by sharing. Tie the sharing to a cultural event or historic movement important to them and give them tools encouraging donations, volunteerism, and action."
Brainstorming
My partner and I spent the first couple hours throwing ideas at each other. With too many ideas to contain, our brainstorm document ended up with random clutter!
TL;DR We wanted to make a platform that (1) lets you connect with other users in communities you care about, (2) find events important or near to you so you can actively participate, and (3) make differences using your collective voices.
Inspiration
We looked for inspiration on social media websites such as Reddit which bring people together. With the goal of unification, it only made sense to look at platforms with large social communities and how they make their experiences engaging. As such, this inspiration from Reddit can be seen in individual Crews pages, where members are allowed to post photos or other discussion threads regarding the crew's movements - mimicking the ideas that subreddits use to engage the communities.
Another social media platform we took inspiration from was Instagram's 'Explore' page, which shows users related posts based on their liked posts and who they're following. We thought this would be a great feature as it would bring new groups or events that the user would like.
We also took looks at the Spotify user experience when we had brainstormed the idea of group playlists. Although this idea was eventually dropped, we discovered how many pages and steps it takes to create a playlist system that Spotify has, granting us a deeper appreciation of our music listening habits.
Finally, the last platforms we investigated were Kickstarter and GoFundMe, which are crowdfunding sites. By learning how they encourage donations from users (by displaying # of people who donated) and how they encourage interactions from users through allowing users to comment or send messages with their donations.
Regarding colour inspiration, we played around with various colour schemes, originally considering yellows and oranges as they expressed brightness and positivity. The blue-greens seen in the final version were proposed because we considered focusing on environmental movements (typically represented by greens and blues found in nature) rather than all movements. However, this eventually stuck as our colour palette even after the switch to include all groups and movements.
The Result
With the 3 day time limit, we worked hard between our courses and assignments. A lot of ideas from our brainstorm were able to be implemented. Some features had to be dropped completely (ex. individual user levels) due to lack of time.
After-Event Thoughts
While we were content with our final project, we would have liked to flesh out ideas such as the explore and crew pages. With limited time, we relied on the idea that judges would be familiar with the social media platforms we were inspired by. However, it could certainly be confusing to those who are not familiar with the terminology or format.
Additionally, we were unable to conduct user testing, which may have exposed difficulties or weaknesses of our app that we, as the designers who came up with the ideas to begin with, were unable to see due to our biases.
Final Thoughts
It was a great experience and one of our first times designing what was essentially a social media platform. I learned a lot of how social media experiences engage their community and I am proud of us achieving yet another honourable mention.
Of course, I could be biased since blue-greens are my favourite colours ;)
