Cinema for Awards - Part I

Reimagining screeners - and their sense of being - a case study through design.

for

Some details in this project have been withdrawn to maintain client confidentiality.

Chapter 1. The life of a screener

Screeners in general is a vague concept. At its core, it isn't exactly a B2B product. But very few of the general public actually get to engage with one. In fact, most wouldn't even know what it is. That's where the first difficulty lies. Awards are essential to global cinema - networks and studios drop billions from their budgets to make sure that they're able to market their prized film to a guild. It isn't a fluke that the Oscars have millions of viewers. And it sure isn't a fluke when Parasite made an additional $150 million (box office and over-the-top viewership) after their big 'Best Picture' win. This is something that's important to them. And it's important that their film gets to the guild - and most importantly - gets to them safely.

Indee's secure screeners platform has existed since 2012, their main competition being Deluxe's screeners, and the mighty (not-so-much) and erroneously expensive DVD screeners. In a lot of ways Indee changed the game. Through their revolutionary security tech and a web platform to host and view it, Indee slowly but surely started gaining traction in the Hollywood screeners market. In 2018, the business model changed to cater heavily to the awards screener market. That's when the challenges began.

The Problems

- An ageing platform

- a more consumer facing model

- backdated design

The Solution

- An FYC based product fork

- model catering to guilds

- updated design

The flow

The site architecture of the viewing platform is very sound. But the wrapper around it was far less convincing. The flow of information for the user was too convoluted, the UI wasn't sure of what the user wanted to do, and the design itself didn't help solve the previous too problems.

So, we decided to properly demarcate the use cases for the product.

Chapter 2. The Viewing Platform

This is the viewer facing side of the product - a place where invitees can view the screeners sent to them. There are two aspects to this - the wider reaching screening platform, and the exclusive-to-guild member FYC platform. It wasn't prudent to design two separate applications for the two different use cases. So we decided to completely redesign the viewer platform, where - barring minor differences - it would be identical for both use cases. Indee's Enterprise plan offers white-labelling of applications, hence necessitating the presence of duplicated viewer side experiences. It's rather simple really - one screens that serves all the purposes. We call it 'The Watch Interface'. And this was our first step in updating Indee's viewer side product.

The Watch Interface

The idea behind the watch interface was to unify the page where the screener is being hosted across all platforms. It acts as the fulcrum of the entire viewing system. Once we had our personas in place, we decided to draw journey maps for them, trying to estimate how they interact with the flow.

Note. We didn't conduct any practical user research in this regard. The way users engaged with Indee has always been for a very specific purpose. The previous versions of Indee was also built around the importance of getting the user to their screener - and nothing more. That fact has remained unchanged in the new version.

The Watch Interface was planned to be built in three phases - each phase necessitating a visual redesign as image processing, data tracking, and video enabling infrastructure in the backend was to be updated. Our goal was to give a user a modern, OTT platform-like experience, without losing the muscle memory that a regular Indee user had.

As of March, 2021 the Watch Interface looks like WI-02 (below). In 2019, when the feature was commissioned, it looked like WI-01, in order to curb system related shortcomings. The system is on course for the third and final phase, to be released in early-2023, when the interface will again change its appearance (WI-03).

WI-01 - c. 2019

WI-02 - c. 2021

WI-03 - c. 2023

Additional Features

01.

The Menu

The menu is the heard of the watch page. It connects to every page that is available to a user. When not logged in, the menu offers options to sign up or login.

03.

The Description Box

Films/shows often include a multitude of additional information like cast and crew, poster, and the like. The description box contains all of that hidden away within a button.

02.

The Information window

Screeners are characterized by their limited scope of view. Senders apply an expiry date and limited views. The information window displays that on a simple hover.

View the Prototype

Responsiveness and Adaptability

Responsiveness is one of the key elements of the watch interface. As the fulcrum of the entire viewing product, it relies heavily on being adapted to every screen size and every device imaginable. Additionally, since the main consumable product here is video content, it was important to design the interface for native television applications as well. The Watch Interface was designed with its universal adaptability in mind - constant across all platforms, using a unified design language, and looks and feels exactly the same across the platforms.

01. Mobile

02. iPads & tablets

[CITYPNG.COM]HD Blue Apple iPhone 12 Pro

View the Prototype

Chapter 3. The world around

Now that we had the fulcrum of our viewing system ready, along with our user personas, we drew journeys from the user to the watch interface - focusing on the Awards platform.

The FYC product was offered as an Enterprise only offering - and as part of that special offering, clients are able to customize the experience specific to them in three ways:

1. Fully customizable login page

2. Option to add/delete separate brands within the larger company,

with their own customized watch interfaces

3. Customizable watch interface allowing for white labeling.