Vancouver International
Film Festival
Redesigning VIFF’s app experience, to truly bring the festival to your pocket.
Presenting the worlds best cinema fused with related talks and events.
Both in terms of admissions and number of films screened, VIFF is among the five largest film festivals in North America, screening films from more than 70 countries over the course of 16 days. During this event over 400 films are screened, in addition to VR Events and Talks. The festival brings many local film enthusiasts out, and many festival-goers will attend films on a daily basis, sometimes viewing up to four films in a single day.
My Role
UX Designer
User Interviews &
User Research
The Team
UX - Amanda Kurek,
Jen Su, Abdul Rafay,
& Miriam Bellon
UI - Newton Ribero &
Achal Kshirsagar
Tools
Adobe XD
Google Suite
Miro
Project Scope
5 Weeks (Nov-Dec 2019)
Academic Industry Project
@ RED Academy
“We’d love for our audience to be able to carry the festival in their pocket.”
— Jane Harrison (VIFF’s Ticketing and CRM Manager)
Our team was tasked with creating a real life solution for VIFF’s existing app. Together, over a five week period, we were able to dive deep into our research and discover the primary functions that a user would expect and appreciate from this app. Our extensive research led us to design an app that is simple, yet exceptional in its functionality and adaptability.
The Problem
One of the main issues begins with the app platform, Attendify, that is currently being used. This app has to be re-installed each year by the user, has many design limitations, and overall leads to a decrease in usability
The current app doesn’t allow the user to properly schedule their viewings. As well, any ticket purchasing links out to their website, which is a major disruptor for the user
The main screen on the current app is a social stream, which, while a nice feature to have, is not the primary focus of the app, this feature takes attention away from the films
Talking to Users
We were able to be put in touch with the top 5% of users of the app from the 2019 festival. This was crucial for our research to be able to get feedback from active users of the app.
We began with interviews, many of these individuals were strong film enthusiasts and, often, platinum pass holders who attended the majority of events and films during the festival. Our research led us to some of the main pain points that these users faced with the app.
Our interviews allowed us to understand more about a users experience at the festival, what they look for when choosing a film and how they actually go through that selection process. We learned that many VIFF customers try to see as many films as they can during the two week festival, so a simple and functional app that helps with scheduling was our top priority.
Through the interview process we were able
to gain further insights into individual perceptions
of the existing app. We knew going in that the
current app had many issues, however our
research determined our main user pain points
Next Steps
Following our interviews, our next step was to craft a survey to further find out what users expect from a film app, and discover more about their typical engagement with films.
The responses gave us more insights on the process people go through when choosing what film they would like to watch, as well as what information they want to be visible up front.
Data Categorization
We started our planning stage by creating an affinity diagram to further categorize the survey results. We began to deconstruct the high number of features we found would be beneficial to the user.
Taking into consideration the time constraints for the project and client, we created an IMPACT vs EFFORT matrix to determine our MVP, while still focusing on the functions of the app to best serve the users needs.
The matrix allowed us to determine the impact the feature would have on the user in reference to the development time and effort
Through this, we were able to further determine our Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Scheduling Conflict
Review / Rate films
Featured Films
Filter Films
In App Purchasing
ONBOARDING, FILTERING
& BOOKMARKING
SCHEDULING CONFLICT
RESOLUTION
IN APP PURCHASING
Design
With our MVP finalized, we were able to move into completing our Information Architecture, and our User Flows to adhere to those main features we wanted to include in the final product.
We then were able to begin our mid-fidelity designs and begin creating a prototype to test with users.
During the user testing we instructed the users to perform four main tasks for us
UI Design
UI Style Guide created by Newton Riberio
While planning out the visual design of the app, our team took into consideration similar existing apps such as Netflix, Spotify, IMBd, etc.
Our UI Team, Newton & Achal, decided on a dark UI for the final design. In order to stick within the users mental model so that the main focus would be on the films. They also found that the dark UI allowed for the films and movie posters to really pop on the app, bringing further focus to the content.
VIFF had an existing logo and branding that we worked within to deliver an app that acts as a supplemental tool to VIFF’s website.
By creating a functional yet simple app we are able to give users a tool to fully enhance their film festival experience.
Users are able to be fully immersed into the film experience by writing and reading the reviews of other users. They are able to seamlessly browse and explore the festival films while bookmarking and scheduling preferred films, while being alerted if there are any conflicts, and then go on to purchase tickets directly within the app.
* Our team was scheduled to present our project to VIFF’s board in order to help advocate for funding and push this project towards development. This was postponed due to COVID-19.
If this project moves forward we will be able to further expand on our MVP.