Comet App
In an Interactive Design class during my undergrad, we were tasked with designing personas, conducting user interviews, and designing an application of our choice. I chose to design an app called Comet, which would be a dual streaming service and social media platform. My areas of focus when conducting user interviews were how to curb toxicity within online fan communities, engaging viewers, and streamlining navigability.
These are the personas, or fictional people who represent who a typical user of my application would be. I kept in mind that combining two different apps could cause a lot of navigability issues.
I also conducted user interviews with three different people who interact with streaming sites and social media regularly. The main takeaways from these interviews was that people felt that users were posting unrealistic personas of themselves, there was a significant amount of gatekeeping within these communities, and that connecting with other people online is what ultimately kept people on these platforms. This outlined particular goals for me as a designer to achieve through my design, like making sure the application would have moderators once launched to curb toxicity, including pages for people to easily share their opinions about media, allowing users to stream movies with friends or alone, and to make sure the webpage is easily navigable.
I started my design process by making a moodboard, picking out fonts and color schemes, and looking to other social media platforms to get an idea of the user experiences that work and don’t work. I wanted the website to be modern and fun, but also chose darker colors so it gave it a calm and cool aesthetic as well. I also laid out wireframes and Information Architecture map to make sure the app was as user friendly and navigable as possible.
Lastly, I designed prototypes of how the app’s interface would look. By the end of the project, I found that I had to make some changes between my wireframes and prototypes, since sometimes sketches don’t work as well when brought to life. I also learned that you can use more than one or two fonts while still having a cohesive and appealing design, and that it takes a bit of artists' ingenuity to solve a client's problem through design work.
