Vice came to our team at Connected with a challenge to help them grow with a younger television audience and help them drive engagement with live television through a soon-to-be-launched VICELAND cable television show. They were particularly interested in leveraging their mobile application as an interaction touchpoint and a strategy of bringing together their different properties. This project was planned with an emphasis on well-framed prompts driving divergent thinking and followed by rapid validation and prioritization.

This was a discovery and identify project where we planned to do two weeks of immersion research, followed by two weeks of ideation and evaluation. In the final four weeks, we would design prototypes, and do some lightweight validation testing, synthesizing our insights into final recommendations that would be within the scope of a development timeline contained by the show's launch date.

The team composition was myself and another product designer for the first two weeks, and in the third week, we had two software engineers onboarded to help us with validating feasibility and also to help us develop functional prototypes that we could use to help us validate our final concepts for desirability.

For the kickoff, we presented a proposal deck and reviewed the project plan with the client. To help us break the ice we also ran a playful ideation session called ‘wild combinations’. The main purpose of this session though was to discuss and align on our objectives, and get to know our team.

We started in this first week with the preparation of various research activities like interviewing and card sorting. We also set up an in-office “living room” to create an environment conducive for interviews about living room entertainment.

We synthesized our learnings into a summary document which included customer profiles for both the shows audiences as well as the onscreen talent. These profiles outlined their core jobs-to-be-done, as well as their pains and gains. We needed to find concepts that would be desirable for the audience, but also meet the needs of the onscreen talent and show producers.

We held a lunch & learn in the Connected lunchroom space where we involved the whole company in a wild combo ideation exercise. To help frame our ideation I developed a wild combination card game that encouraged our workshop attendees to generate concepts that would be desirable to Vice’s audience and leverage Vice media properties and talent, but engaging with new technologies, ideas, and interaction patterns.

The workshop generated hundreds of ideas, which each group clustered, evaluated and voted on which they felt were the best ideas, which we then had them develop into storyboards.

We synthesized the output from our workshop and found 3 recurrent themes which focused on different types of relational value that the audience is having in their interaction with the live show and the Vice brand. We named these three themes OUR VICE, YOUR VICE and MY VICE, and we used these as frames to to help us generate ideas within. We evaluated and converged on our best ideas, which we developed into three distinct concepts.

I worked with my partner to mature the three concepts we’d converged on, and design a prototype for each of them to help us do some early validation testing, and also to share and communicate our concepts with various stakeholders. After the engineering team did some technical validation, we chose 2 of the 3 concepts that were within scope for us to implement within a high fidelity prototype. We decided to present the third concept as a tappable Invision prototype; since this concept didn’t deal with any novel interactions this was sufficient enough to help us validate it and communicate the concept to our stakeholders.

My Viceland is about the Audience and their influence. They express it with on-the-fly Polling.

YOUR VICELAND is about Talent and their ability to invite and reveal.

OUR VICELAND is about the relationship between Audience and Talent. It's about the collective and the unfiltered lens.

We employed the service of some fine volunteers to pretend they were on a live show that our participants would watch inside of the staged office living room. By doing this our prototype allowed the participants to interact with the polls and questions that were created by the hosts of the live show, and see their decisions impact the direction of the show. This live element of the prototype worked well to communicate the overall experience. We received some helpful feedback during the user testing that made an impact on our final iteration and concept presentation.

In 8 weeks we conducted generative research, extensive ideation, evaluation, user testing and final prototype development for 3 concepts, 1 our stakeholders moved forward with, it also led to our quick follow project with Vice News.

Project by the numbers:

For the concept presentation, we staged each of the prototypes in the living room, just like we did for our user research, and ran through them one at a time. In the end, the client was interested in several of the ideas, and think that at some point the one based on 180º could be implemented.

As a result of deciding to develop higher fidelity native prototypes, the engineers on our team were able to provide valuable insights into possible implementation approaches and help the client’s developers scope the efforts required to move forward with confidence. This allowed for better collaboration and transparency with the client’s developers along the way which aided in the client relationship.