BigShoutOut lets users get custom video greetings from celebrities.

The Challenge

US Celebrities found a new way to connect with their fans and earn extra cash at the same time. How? By selling custom greetings (like for example happy-birthday wishes) in the form of video recordings. This concept was still fairly unknown in Asia at the time. Our client had quickly spotted the market opportunity and asked us, eevy design studio, to design an app that would enable Asian celebrities to sell their greetings, shoutouts and wishes. As WeChat is one of the most popular social platforms in Asia, we were tasked to make the app work as one of the WeChat Mini Programs.

The idea of what the project was about was clear from the start but how and what the final product should look like and be able to do was still not finalized.

The challenge: To creatively develop the look and feel of the app: Its user interface, user experience plus all the possible interactions between celebrities and their admirers. It was also our role to design the system’s backend.

Goals

The main goal of the Big Shoutout app project was to create a platform for both end users groups:

• The fans that would be able to browse through celebrities, order specific videos and complete payments

• The celebrities that would be able to either accept the request (create a video and receive payment) or decline (the user would receive a refund)

Project vision statement: To create a most popular solution for personalized fan experiences in Asia.

User Experience goals:

• To meet functional demands of the end users

• To highlight the fun aspects of the service through design: for example, by choosing live colors adding cheerful animations

• To make the product attractive enough to keep the users interested for a long term

User Interface goals:

• To create an easy-to-navigate interface that users would enjoy to explore and that would also be compatible with the system of WeChat mini-apps

• To provide an informative feedback for each complicated action

• To make UI consistent with the graphic profile that has been discussed with the client

Understanding the client

Conditions surrounding this project were pretty straight-forward right from the beginning of the project which resulted in a very transparent situation with little space for misunderstandings. The design and management team members both agreed to not exceed the timeline of the project which was less than 8 weeks.

The design process was reviewed almost every day together with the clients. During the meetings comments from the project management team and developers were very much welcomed. After receiving the feedback, I would then implement the changes in the design and get back to the team to discuss next steps.

Research

To understand the situation better we had to make sure that the design matched the asian esthetics. After doing some research and setting up the options for the client to choose from, the graphic style was chosen. The styling that won out when testing different versions was colorful UI elements accompanied with thick outlines which contrasted with both black and white backgrounds.

The US equivalent of the app, Cameo was analysed in order to outline the current key features and design trends. The findings could then serve as a possible source for inspiration.

Design process

During the design process, I was able to develop over ten versions (not counting edits) of the main product, four versions of the backend and five versions of the talent app. All the versions were available for the client to see and give feedback on at any time. The positive aspect of working this way was that everyone on board could easily track the progress and be very much included throughout the project.

Because the project had to be completed within a short amount of time, the design’s focus shifted towards delivering a well-developed functionality instead of focusing on the visual aspects. For example, figuring out how to add animated watermarks to the custom videos was prioritised over matching UI design of the settings page to the latest UI trends.

Final Result

This is the look and feel of the app that was the result of the project: