II. Research and Synthesis

Now that we have defined the project’s hypothesis statements, we asked ourselves: How might we ensure that these statements are true as quickly and cheaply as possible so that future decisions stand a better chance of succeeding? Our answer was research in the form of user interviews, surveys, and online searches.

This section tackles the research process we followed to learn about the problem space and to validate the assumptions we declared in the previous section. Our focus centered around the topics of movie note-taking, general journaling, and movie watching habits.

Note: for simplicity reasons we use the term ‘movie note-taking’ instead of ‘movie journaling’ from now on to avoid any confusion with regular journaling.

Research plan

We planned our research based on the statements we wanted to validate and/or concepts we wanted to learn. The research method we used varied on what we wanted to learn. For example, we used:

Desk research – when we wanted to have a good understanding of the problem space or wanted to create a good starting point for the primary research.
Surveys – when we had specific questions we wanted to ask and needed a large sample size confirmation.
User interviews – when we wanted to understand the user’s feelings, motivations, and routines.

The image below shows the different research methods we used to learn about the problem space or to validate hypothesis statements.

The material obtained from user interviews was turned into bits of information and used to construct an affinity map to identify user’s behaviours, pain points, and motivators. Then, we reorganized the information to identify themes and insights.

The next sections will guide you through how the research we conducted informed the assumptions we originally made and defined the problem space and design direction. We also updated the proto-persona and created a journey map for movie note-taking.

Defining the problem space

Before validating or disproving any hypothesis, we needed to define what movie note-taking really is. From online research and interviews, we have learnt that…

“Movie note-taking is a way to keep a record of your movie-watching experience. This record can be physical or digital and may include your personal take on the movie (likes, dislikes, etc), your critique on several of its elements (e.g. themes, cinematography, score, etc), and the log of relevant details (e.g. cast, director, etc). Another aspect of movie note-taking is the creation of lists to keep track of movies you have watched or want to watch, for example”

Design direction

By analysing the main insights and themes obtained from the research phase, I was able to define the design direction for the MemoReel app. There were three major points that were considered:

Movie note-taking or journaling is not used for therapeutic reasons or to process emotional events like the regular journaling is. Instead, movie note-taking is mainly used to keep a log of the user’s movie experiences (i.e. thoughts, analysis, etc). This information was very important for us because we could now divert from designing MemoReel like a journaling app (e.g soft colors, calming language, etc), hence challenging one of our initial hypothesis statements. Now, our focus shifted to a more simple, elegant, and to-the-point design that fosters creativity in users while they write their notes.
Movie notes are not as decorative as Pinterest makes them look. In fact, 92% of people we survey do not decorate their notes at all. This made us realize that our design focus should not be about fancy note editing features; but rather on very simple ones that allow our users to complete their notes quickly.
Users spend some time figuring out what to watch next, so to complement movie note taking and list creation, a ‘movie discovery’ feature can be added. This would not only add value to our users, but it would prompt them to watch more movies and therefore write more movie notes.

Other insights that informed our design

The following are insights that helped shape the MemoReel app. They were mainly obtained from surveys and user interviews:

Approximately 70% of participants prefer free writing and bullet points over guided note-taking.
88% of participants check movie details (cast, director, year of release, movie summary, and reviews) while movie note-taking.
Interviewed users indicated that note-taking structure includes date, title, and personal rating.
Users structure their movie lists with date, movie name, rating, and sometimes color coding.
63% of participants prefer the 5-star rating system when rating movies.

Our competitors

Through user interviews, we were able to confirm that our main competitors are Letterboxd and the Notes app. We reviewed each app carefully to determine what features they offered, how they deliver user experience, and to discover its strengths and weaknesses.

Persona development: Ian

The main input used to update the proto-persona was the responses we obtained from the Movie Note-taking User Interviews. There, we learnt more about who our users are and what goals, pain points, and motivations they have.

Ian's journey

While working on Ian’s persona, we also created a user journey map based on what he will go through during the entire movie note-taking experience. User interviews were the basis for this journey map.

Other gems we uncovered

Movie note-taking is a common activity among movie watchers. Approximately 50% of the people we surveyed are engaged in the activity. 46% of them take notes for every movie they watch, while 56% take notes only sometimes.
We confirmed that movie note-taking fits in the “entertainment” part of the user’s life.
Surveyed participants write about what they liked, disliked, plot, characters, themes, and cinematography.
Covid-19 has influenced the movie watching behaviour of users. Quarantine measures have allowed them to watch more movies than usual and, therefore, increased their interest in movie lists and note taking. Future research should be directed towards confirming the continuation of this type of behaviour.
Based on two different user interview sessions, we noticed that people who do movie note-taking do not journal in any other way.