kuro

✦ Prélude

ROLE

Lead UX Designer & Researcher

APPROACH

Lean UX

DURATION

7 Weeks (2024)

MEDIUM

Figma, FigJam, Teams

RELEVANT LINKS

Figma FigJam Prototype

Overview

An all-in-one anime hub 💻

Kuro is a web application prototype designed to provide a streamlined experience for manga and anime viewers, curate an extensive anime catalog, and allow users to explore and organize anime content. In the fall of 2024, I pitched Kuro as an idea for my Interaction Design II class and was chosen as the team lead. For the duration of this project, my team and I would build Kuro following an adapted version of the Lean UX framework, given our course timeline.

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Problem

Lack of anime content & integration leaves fans frustrated 😖

As my team and I are all avid anime and manga fans, we realize how difficult it is to find a streamlined experience that allows them to enjoy both forms of media in the same space. Moreover, many mainstream anime and manga sites have limited content availability, which leads to many users migrating to illegal anime streaming sites that are constantly taken down.

Approach

Forming assumptions with Lean UX 🤔

Lean UX is a collaborative-based methodology focused on forming assumptions, rapid experimentation, and iterative learning. By following this way of thinking, the Lean UX method allowed my team and I to make assumptions on who would use our product, as well as attempt to validate our assumptions through testing aspects of our product.

Sprint 1

Week 0 - Laying the groundwork ✍️

My team and I started Sprint 1 by creating our Lean UX canvas, a compilation of exercises meant to help teams brainstorm and declare their assumptions regarding the key elements of a product concept. The Lean UX canvas helped my team and I to share our assumptions on key problems and potential user needs, as well as form testable hypotheses about possible solutions.

Product Problem Statement

As the team lead, I scheduled and led meetings with my team to complete the Lean UX canvas which housed assumptions we formulated for our product. Through these meetings, we came to the assumption that the current state of media platforms treat anime-related content as low priority, which limits the anime/manga streaming experience. We believed that our product would address this gap by providing an affordable, accessible, and extensive anime and manga streaming service.

Proto-Personas

During this week, my team and I also created the first iteration of our proto-personas. We assumed those who would be most interested would be anime fans seeking to share their interests in a community.

Our first proto-persona, Sebastian, was a college-aged CompSci major seeking to share his passion for anime and manga with a community of like-minded people. Our second proto-persona, Selena, was a middle-aged casual anime viewer who wanted a consistent source for anime that would also allow her to network with people within the anime community.

Sprint 1 Backlog

After creating our proto-personas, we moved on to forming possible solutions for their problems and determining how we would validate our solutions. We then created a Sprint 1 backlog which included features we wanted to test during our first sprint that had a high perceived value, but also a high perceived risk in addressing our proto-personas’ problems.

Sprint 1

Week 1 & 2 - Get out of the house! 🏠

During our first sprint, we interviewed six participants who we believed identified with one of our two proto-personas. Because we believed our product would mainly be used by younger anime viewers, we prioritized interviewing college students with some form of interest in anime. Every two days during a sprint, I led 15-minute stand-up meetings where my team members and I would all meet to discuss where we were currently at with our project and tasks that were expected to be done prior to the next meeting.

Testing Concepts

For our first three interviews, we as a team formed interview questions that focused on learning more about our participants and how they interact with anime-related content on a daily basis. Specifically, we asked questions such as, “How important is interacting with anime communities to you” and “What are your least favorite aspects of the streaming service you use?” Such questions helped us to learn:

Testing MVP's

I decided to create an MVP (minimum viable product) in the form of a lo-fi wireframe for our proposed subscription system to test and validate many of the assumptions we made in Design Week Zero. Within these tiers lied many of the assumed user needs between our two personas such as a need for community, networking, and affordability.

Affinity Mapping

After each interview, I would hold an affinity mapping session with my team. Before we began, I would ask my team questions such as, "What are the most important things we learned from the interview?" I would then set a 10-minute timer for us to jot down all of our thoughts on a FigJam board. Once the timer went off, we would then discuss and group our notes based on observable patterns.

From affinity mapping, we learned that our assumptions were not quite on the mark. Rather than highly valuing community and networking in addition to streaming, users value a focused, extensive streaming experience that allows them to find the anime/manga they want to see.

Sprint 1 Insights

Users are hesitant to engage in direct community discussion; not useful nor appealing
Algorithmic recommendations make users feel that they lose autonomy; negatively affects user experience
Users prioritize viewing experience and see little need for networking

Sprint 1 Retrospective

At the end of the first sprint I held a sprint retrospective with my team, an hour long meeting meant for us as a team to discuss how we felt the sprint went. As a team, we realized that due to many of our interviewees (and ourselves) being college students, it was difficult to confirm dates and times which often led to last-minute interviews that lacked direction. We also realized that we needed more structured questions, especially regarding the social aspect of Kuro to meet users' needs.

Sprint 2

Week 0 - Revalidation station 🚆

Sprint 2, Week Zero began with scheduling meetings with my team to revalidate, or revisit, assumptions we made on our Lean UX Canvas. Revalidating our assumptions allowed us to see what significantly changed after experimentation and if there was anything we needed to fix in order to address these changes.

Out With Forums, In With Reviews

After the first round of testing during Sprint 1, we discovered that the idea of anime/manga discussion forums were not only unappealing to users, but also viewed as quite useless to their viewing experience. Due to this, we pivoted from a focus on community forums to anime/manga reviews provided by users to provide useful information while promoting a more subtle sense of community.

Testing, Testing, Testing

My team created a backlog for Sprint 2 that highlighted what features we wanted to test. There were some changes made from our original hypothesis table as we removed and, in some cases, replaced certain features. Recognizing that personalization and autonomy are invaluable to our platform, we decided to focus on onboarding for recommendations, personalized news, and interactivity amongst friends.

This was a shift from our original focus on AI recommendations, entertainment news, and community discussion which made testing crucial to ensure that we were actually addressing users' needs.

Revisiting Proto-Personas

During our revalidation phase, we realized that having two personas was unnecessary. Because we were only interviewing college-aged anime/manga viewers, we decided to get rid of our second proto-persona, Selena, as she did not accurately represent our research. Through our findings, we also learned that users value interaction, but in a more controlled environment with their friends rather than online users.

Due to these findings, we decided to change Sebastian’s need for community interaction to focus more on wanting a way to discuss and share anime/manga with his friends.

Sprint 2

Week 1 & 2 - From low to high-fidelity 💻

Sprint 2 went underway similarly to Sprint 1; we interviewed a total of six people, some new and some recurring, with all being college students who were fans of anime and manga. We also moved toward higher fidelity mockups, adding color and creating a more realistic-looking design.

Fleshing Out Anime Page

Moving into Sprint 2, and subsequently creating more high-fidelity designs, I decided to incorporate more context-specific text within the anime page. I included details I assumed would be important to users such as maturity rating, number of episodes, etc. I then tested this page for Sprint 2 and asked users questions such as "How do you feel about the information provided in the details section?" By asking these questions I learned that:

Liked that the anime page had description details such as maturity rating, anime studio, etc.
Wanted a way to know what manga chapters are covered within a given season in its anime adaptation

Anime & Manga Integration

From Sprint 2, Week 1, my team learned that the anime page was lacking in terms of manga integration which made our site feel more like a traditional video streaming site. To address this, I adapted the “episodes” section to display what manga chapters are associated with its respective anime adaptation (i.e. Season 1 covers Chapters 1-5). I also added a way for users to quickly switch between episodes and chapters within the anime page.

Sprint 2 Retrospective

Similar to Sprint 1, I held a sprint retrospective with my team at the end of Sprint 2 where we discussed what he had accomplished along with what final changes we would make during the refinement stage. Our proto-persona, Sebastian, remained relatively the same as we validated his frustrations and needs through testing conducted throughout Sprint 2.

Refinement

Success is about consistency 📏

After Sprint 2 ended, my team and I spent a week refining Kuro and making some final changes to maintain consistency. We spent this time to ensure that we followed a relative 8-pt grid, used color and text styles, and made use of auto layout.

Final Result

Kuro, for anime fans, by anime fans 📺

Over the course of seven weeks, my team and I were able to create a high-fidelity and functional prototype of Kuro, an all-in-one hub for anime and manga fans alike.

Reflection

Key takeaways as a design leader 💡

Being able to create Kuro and working with my teammates was an arduous, yet satisfying experience. Adapting to Lean UX was difficult, and even though I faced many challenges for those seven weeks, I learned invaluable lessons!

Assumptions are just that—assumptions. My team and I made assumptions that were ultimately invalidated after interviewing users, but sitting down with users helped us to learn what their needs actually were.
Understanding your teammates strengths and weaknesses is important. Sitting down with each member to talk about which aspects of design, research, and collaboration they excelled in helped me to delegate appropriate tasks.
Time management is key! My teammates and I (along with the interviewees) are college students with busy schedules. I learned the hard way that planning in advance is important, and how important it was for my team to capitalize on the little shared time we had.
I enjoy creating and working with design systems! Being able to create a consistent foundation for my product felt like creating puzzle pieces and then placing those pieces together. It was a very satisfying experience that drove me to be creatively strategic.

Keep in touch! 👋🏽