PROJECT OVERVIEW

Many of us are aware of TED's influence with their devotion to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. However, apart from the Youtube comments section, there are little opportunities to further discuss and see the outcomes of the sharing of those ideas.  

Throughout five weeks within a senior UX Design course, I was part of a team that designed a feature which would enable further sharing of those ideas for unheard voices with an integration to the TED app.  

The goal of this platform is to facilitate progressive discussion and enable accessibility.  TED Voices is an integrated open source platform that encourages global discourse and exploring discussions around TED ideas through video responses.

PROJECT CONTEXT

YEAR & DURATION

2021 - 5 Weeks

CONTEXT

Senior UX Design Course - IAT 438

THE TEAM

Cam Dawson, Carolyn Yip, Cora Fu, Ethan Ma

MY ROLE

UX Design, UI Design, Strategy, Prototyping

The Sprint

Conducting a week long sprint to validate our MVP, and develop a content strategy. A lot to test, very little time.

SPRINT TEST 01 - ONLINE DISCUSSIONS

How do people discuss online via video platform?

Given the tight 2 week deadline, I designed a team test and discussion which would give us a starting point at understanding how people go about sharing and discussing things via video.

We specifically chose individuals that are comfortable sharing online for this test and asked them to respond to a discussion thread about privilege. A total of 10 individuals were interviewed and 5 filmed their responses.

SPRINT TEST 02 - DO NODES WORK?

We integrated a categorization system called Nodes, was it useful? Yes and no...

Some participants were able to understand the size of a node in relation to the amount of engagement it has, whereas most participants were unsure of the spatial relationships between nodes and how they were represented.

Initially our designs were too expressive and focused on creating a visual map of the discussions, but they were hard to follow. Above you can see how we opted for a simplified UI which used nodes as a visual categorization system instead. Below you can see the end outcome of our Nodes testing.

Here you can see the end outcome of our Nodes testing and how our categorization system works in alignment with TED's brand.

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

What drew our participants was that TED creates its own space which allows for certain kinds of conversations that other platforms do not.

DEVISING A USER FLOW

I helped map out the entire user flows and choose which ones were worth prototyping for the final deliverable.

Given the scope and tight deadline, the team decided to focus on the screens that would help convey our idea most clearly. Scope creep is real.

APP INTEGRATION

Integrating into the already existing TED ecosystem.

FEATURE HOMEPAGE

Discover interesting discussions directly from all of TED's platforms.

ENGAGE FLOW - RESPONSES

Our response list view provides a higher level overview of the discussions for a certain topic.

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