Solace

Multi-media website design

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This is a recommendation platform designed to bring together personalized suggestions for books, movies, and music—all in one place. Unlike traditional platforms that rely on generic, genre-based recommendations, it tailors its suggestions to your specific mood and emotional intensity, creating a truly personalized experience.

Key Features

Mood-Based Recommendations: Users receive curated suggestions that align with their current feelings, making each recommendation more relevant and meaningful.

Interactive Video Reviews: MoodMatch encourages users to actively engage with the platform by sharing video reviews of what they’ve read, watched, or listened to, fostering a sense of community.

All-in-One Solution: By combining books, movies, and music recommendations in one platform, MoodMatch offers a seamless, centralized experience.

Role: User Interface Designer

Problem Statement

The current entertainment recommendations primarily focus on movie, book, or music recommendations separately. The users tend to be young people between the ages of 21-29. However, current existing solutions fail to address the fact that young people want to be able to find all their recommendations in one place.

Additionally, many recommendation websites provide very generic recommendations, seem very old, their links often do not work, or they do not have updated selections of recommendations. These websites are also difficult to navigate and do not allow for any social interactions with friends. I will address this gap by creating a website that provides recommendations based on users’ interests. The website will provide recommendations based on users’ moods and emotions.

The website's users will also be able to build a personal profile which the website will also consider when providing recommendations. Additionally, the users will be able to have an interactive experience by being able to share their reviews of what they have watched, listened to, or read. It will be an enjoyable and interactive experience.

Background

Many tech-savvy young people do not have the patience to navigate sites that are not modern and user-friendly. They also have relatively short attention spans, so their interest needs to be grabbed immediately when they open a new website.

These users also enjoy comparing the different features offered by a variety of websites. Young people also want to be up to date with new releases in terms of entertainment. They also want to be able to quickly share any information with friends and peers. Ideally, the target users would be professional young people who consume a lot of social media or media in general and are always looking for something new to watch, read or listen to. They can use their free time to quickly find something new to consume or something new to recommend to their friends or peers.

All they would need would be a laptop and a stable internet connection. They would also need to have a social media account on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to be able to share and recommend things to friends.

Value Proposition

The biggest benefit of this website is being able to find recommendations for books, movies, and music all in one place. These recommendations will not be generic, but they will be based on your mood and emotions and how strongly you feel that way.
This is unique as most recommendation platforms simply have generic recommendations based on genre. It will also be an interactive platform where people can share video reviews of what they have read, watched, or listened to. This is different from other recommendation sites right now which are not very interactive for the users.

Ideation

With the website concept in mind, myself and a User Researcher began brainstorming paper wireframes prioritizing the flow and functionality of the website

User Research

Based on the website concept I created, I tested its usability by conducting an unmoderated usability test with 3 participants. The usability test was for about 30 minutes each. Following this, I conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants. I wanted to understand how the participants used the website and if there were any paint points.

The participants were my target demographic, they were young professionals between the ages of 24-28. All the participants were female.

The usability test consisted of 3 tasks:

1. To find a new book recommendation based on their mood within 10 minutes
2. To buy a book
3. To review a book and share their review with a friend on the platform within 10 minutes

Results

• All 3 participants were able to complete tasks 1 and 2.
• The 3rd task was challenging, 2 users who failed this task found it a little difficult to figure out how to get to the page where they could share their reviews.

User Feedback and Pain Points

1. “This list of moods and emotions are too limited”- P1
2. “I still feel like this is a generic list based on the emotions I picked”- P2
3. “It would be cool to be able to select media based on a certain time period, for example between 2000-2006”- P3
4. “I would love to share my video review with a friend who doesn’t use this app, can I do that?”- P1

5. “I feel like this is a great idea but I don’t think there are enough recommendations here”.- P2

Design

The concept I settled on for the design was colourful yet minimalist. I used illustrations to introduce colours into a simple linear gradient layout for most of the pages so users are not overwhelmed with too much information. I also gave each type of media a different colour code to better guide users.

One of the criticisms from the user research was the lists of emotions are "too limited". The possibility of adding another range of emotions to choose from will be explored if it comes up again from multiple participants after examining a larger sample. We believe these options are sufficient to pinpoint most of our users' feelings and suggest a range congruent with them. In addition, following a suggestion of adding a period, the focus for this website is entertainment according to one's mood, so although we are open to exploring the option, that suggestion may not enhance the primary objectives of the website.

With regards to the video review option, we purposely kept the video-sharing option for users of the website for users to encourage their friends to join the website. We will work on the option of sharing to users who do not use the website yet as a way to promote the website.

Accesibility

An appropriate contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 was used throughout the app flow to help users with low vision, colour blindness, or worsening vision see and read text on the app.

Legible fonts and font sizes were used for easy reading.

Hierarchical and sequential headings were used throughout the pages with images to guide those who may not be fluent in English as to what each action button means.

Takeaways

Based on the feedback I received, I believe implementing a simple, user-friendly guide starting from the home page would greatly improve the experience of recording a review. Enhancing the recommendation algorithm is another key area for improvement, as it could offer a more diverse selection of movie options tailored to different moods. Additionally, providing users with clear shortcuts for navigating the website would streamline usability and save time. Lastly, expanding the current list of moods and emotions is essential, as the existing options don’t fully capture the complexity and variety of human feelings.

Sources

Illustrated images: https://undraw.co/
Pictures of movies: https://www.amazon.ca/ref=nav_logo
Synopsis of movies: https://www.imdb.com/?ref_=nv_home
Icons: https://www.flaticon.com/
Profile images: https://www.kindpng.com/