The SHRIEK app is an app for horror movie fans who want to keep track of, rate and find horror movies. The project was a collaboration between myself, Jo-Lynne Koh, and Brian Cortes for IAT 334. Our goal was to create an interface and experience that would appeal to hardcore fans of the genre and provide them with an app that would meet their specific needs in terms of what they look for in a film as, from our market research, what horror fans look for in a film can be different from what fans of other movie genres are looking for.
01
Initial Research
To start off, we examined similar movie apps (IMDB, Letterboxd, etc.) to explore what we liked about them, what we found didn't work, and what could be more specific to our target audience. We became very interested in the idea of movie lists, which allow users to share their thoughts by organizing their own libraries of films.
02
Personas
We continued to research with some initial interviews and were able to narrow down some profiles of horror movie fans with slightly different needs. We saw that many fans were young and wanted a thrilling experience to have with their friends. These fans just wanted to know "would it be scary?" and "would it be fun?" Meanwhile, some were more experienced with the genre and more critical in their enjoyment. They were more likely to watch alone or in smaller groups, and analyze the film.
03
Initial Sketches
We began to do some initial interface sketches in order to plan out the interactions and experience for our users. We also began ideating on ways we could make the app appeal aesthetically to our target audience.
04
Interaction Mapping
We began to plan the interactions in further detail, imagining more in-depth how users would move through the app using wireframe sketches, and mapping.
05
Style Guide
We began to look into the aesthetic further and explore which fonts and colours fit the theme best. From this ideation, we created a style guide to follow as we began work on the prototype.
06
First Prototype
In UXPin, we created our first prototype of the app. It showed the design and interactions, although it was not fully functional in terms of creating lists. We conveyed the function through the examples created in the app.
07
User Testing
We conducted a series of interviews in order to observe and see how they intuitively moved through the app. We asked them to complete a couple tasks in the app and had them speak aloud so we could monitor their thought process and see if they behaved as we expected. We then gave a severity rating to each issue found so we knew what to focus our attention on.
