Olympics Together
Olympics Together is a streaming platform that allows users to watch with other viewers and deeply engage with on-screen events through the second-screen experience which supplements extra content and peer-to-peer interaction.
Timeframe
Aug 2024 - Nov 2024
Role
Product, UX/UI designer
Team
Jovey Lam, Sarah Athar
Context
Our problem area explored the lacklustre viewing experience of remote Olympic viewers, and how we could elevate it to improve interest towards the Olympics, athletes and host country. Based on the design brief of lifestyle, leisure and entertainment - The Olympic Games, we were tasked with create a digital design solution that includes omnichannel and/or multimodal interactions.
Solution
To recreate the thrill of the in-person atmosphere and foster connection, Olympics Together is a streaming platform that allows users to watch with other viewers and deeply engage with on-screen events through the second-screen experience which supplements extra content and peer-to-peer interaction.
The Summer Olympics are one of the world’s most monumental sporting events.
For remote viewers, the physical distance and lack of a thrilling crowd atmosphere creates a disconnected and lacklustre experience.
How can we foster a collective remote experience to celebrate the games and Olympic values with others?
They desire to feel part of a collective experience, celebrating the games and Olympic values with other viewers.
Design Outcome
Reimagine the Remote Olympic Experience
Share the fun with friends!
Pick a stream, make your room public and allow friends to join. Watch with others remotely, perfectly synced.
Feel the Thrill!
Don’t miss out on the Live Action! Receive real-time commentary from verified Sport Experts, and play along.
Test your knowledge!
Play trivia and engage your mind while you watch, enjoy friendly competition, and deepen your understanding of the game.
Let's Talk Process.
My Contribution 💟
01
Discover
💟 Conducting interviews
○ Questionnaire
○ Online Ethnography
💟 Contextual Inquiry
💟 Competitor Analyses
02
Define
💟 Created personas
○ Storyboarding
💟 Affinity Diagramming
💟 Concept Ideation
03
Develop
💟 Design matrices
💟 Mobile App Prototype
○ Laptop Prototype
04
Deliver
💟 Think-aloud user testing
Exploring the problem.
Our Initial Problem Area
Every four years, the Games offer host cities a unique opportunity to shine on the world stage, promising social, environmental, and economic benefits.
However, the international spotlight also brings risks, such as hyper-criticism and negative publicity.
For example, Beijing 2008 faced global scrutiny over human rights issues in Tibet, leading to calls for boycotts of the opening ceremony, but sympathy over the May earthquake led to attendance by all. Despite this, China’s well-organised Games and extravagant opening ceremony helped reframe the country as an emerging global power. Similarly, studies found Rio 2016’s negative press on infrastructure, favelas and unfulfilled promises damaged perceptions of Brazil. These cases illustrate how the media focus on issues like human rights, crime, and pollution can alter global perceptions of host countries.
The Olympics embody global unity, peace, and shared values, but if they fail to effectively showcase a host nation’s cultural identity, they risk undermining these principles.
How we might optimise the Olympics to highlight and explain a host nation’s culture, enhancing its cultural capital and country image?
Cultural capital refers to the perceived value of a nation’s cultural assets—its traditions, arts, heritage, and social practices.
how to increase the cultural reach of Olympic host nations through the Olympic Games.
Identify shared experiences through online forums with anonymity for more authentic accounts
Visualise trends in data through the large sample size
Draw deeper personal experience, motivations, beliefs and attitudes
We observed participants reactions to various Opening Ceremonies, identifying key reactions to significant moments.
We utilised a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to gather comprehensive data. By employing triangulation, we combined multiple research methods to cross-verify our findings, enhancing the credibility, validity and depth of our results, and eliminating bias.
Pinpointing the problem.
From our research, we storyboarded key anecdotes from our research to highlight the significant ways people interact with the games. We found that solo watchers were the group that did not engage deeply with the Olympic games.
Three key experiences emerged from our research which we embodied through personas. We decided to focus on Denise as she struggles most with staying engaged with the Olympics, lacking a sense of connection of interest. Her experience also reflects the solo watching experience where her interaction with the games was only surface-level.
Our other personas:
Our Persona 💟 Denise Gonzalez
The Casual Enjoyer
Denise is a young professional who likes to keep up with news. She has limited time to watch the Olympics but occasionally tunes in to events on TV. However, she’s largely disengaged by her lacklustre and sporadic viewing experience.
“Its once every four years. I don't want to miss that.”
97%
learned about the host city’s culture through social media
74%
found negative news significantly affected their perceptions of host cities
Refining Our Problem Area
Why aren’t viewers engaging with the Olympics?
The Problem Summarised
Solving the problem.
Concept Development
An online Olympic Watch Party experience which allows friends to collaboratively schedule watch parties, select and watch events together, fostering community. To enhance the viewing experience, the app offers multimodal features triggering outputs for a thrilling atmosphere. Real time contextual information accompanies each event, allowing viewers to better understand and engage.
Initial Iteration
Before we began testing, we attempted to iterate our final concept to make it more novel and enhance its multimodal and omni-channel features. We focused on making the Watch Party experience more physical, enhancing thrill and atmosphere in a physical setting. We changed the device from a laptop to a phone & TV. The experience was centred around the TV with users able to mount their phone and use gesture detection to interact with the TV. Using gestures, they could produce micro-interactions on the TV or take photos and document their watch party experience, during ad-breaks
After conducting two short Think-Aloud tests on mid-fidelity wireframes, we quickly learned that this concept was over-engineered and too novel. This also reiterated that thrill was created by simple yet meaningful aspects that foster connection, such as friends' presence or deeper knowledge.
Improving our solution.
Our iterative process consisted of 7 main iterations, each iteration was improved upon based on feedback from user and expert testing sessions or by increasing fidelity.
In total, we tested our product with 16 users over 2 different sessions.
We used the Think-aloud Protocol as it allowed us to clearly identify users misconceptions, while providing enough context to interpret the reasoning behind them. This cheap and robust method allowed us to test with a large sample size and gave us the flexibility to run independent sessions without differences in facilitators significantly impacting results.
We observed them after asking them to complete tasks like:
Task 1: Making your room public to friends
Task 2: Going through the second-screen onboarding
Task 3: Exploring the second-screen experience features
Task 4: Finding out what their friends have watched
Afterwards, we asked them questions like:
What did you enjoy about the platform?
What did you dislike about the platform?
What confused you?
Then we used an Affinity Diagram to organise our themes. Similar usability issues were clustered by Insight and then under their respective features. We chose affinity diagramming due to its flexible and collaborative nature which allowed us to easily compile different group member’s findings. This helped us visually identify the features requiring most refinement and additionally, plan what to test further.
Based on user feedback, the Friends Feed had a few UI changes. Many users were confused about the purpose of this page at first so a description was added for clarity. Font size was increased to improve readability and the “Watch Event” / “Join Room” buttons were simplified for a more minimal look.
