Conversa
The Recording Experience
StoryFile is full of heart: Their mission is to use video and artificial intelligence as a tool for preserving and communicating stories. The company transformed recordings of historical figures into AI videos you can speak to—as if the person were sitting in front of you. StoryFile has been able to capture the firsthand stories of multiple holocaust survivors, figures from the black history movement, and notable figures today such as William Shatner. Their AI is featured in museums and used in partnerships with other companies as a new method to communicate impactful stories.
Conversa is StoryFile’s artificial intelligence creation and management web application. The focus of this case study is Conversa’s MVP feature: the record screen, or the screen used to film and create a custom AI.
Responsibilities
UI Design
UX Design
Interaction Design
Prototyping
User Research and Testing
Adobe XD
Figma
Miro
Tools
Timeline
Ongoing; Began January 2023
My Revised Design
The Problem
When I first joined the team, StoryFile was focused on keeping up with their fast-paced success and not on testing the effectiveness of their UI or UX. Under the former Head of Design, the focus was to create quickly—3 products in one year—but they lacked the follow-through of testing their initial designs. This lack of usability testing hurt the company long term, because they weren’t invested in listening to what their users needed. The company began to lose money and their success started to decline.
Having now few financial resources, a lack of clear branding, and a lack of direction for their UI language, the foundation was built on shaky ground. The former Head of Design was removed from the company, leaving me as the Senior UI/UX Designer asking:
How can we make our product easier to understand, and turn our former success back around?
We started with improving he MVP feature of Conversa: the record screen, or the experience of recording and creating an AI from scratch.
Before
Here is a prototype showing the old Conversa recording experience
Research
I led multiple types of research to find the key ways users’ wanted their recording experience improved. I conducted 2 rounds of user testing for this feature, competitive analysis, and surveys with users and clients to identify how we could improve.
Quantitative Surveys
30 StoryFile users were given a Google Forms survey to express their experience, expectations, and desires for improvements to the record screen. We used this information to inform the questions we asked when collecting qualitative data within our usability tests.
Some key findings included:
Usability Testing
The product team, led by the Head of UX, a moderator, and I, conducted 2 rounds of usability testings: one to discover the users’ key needs, and the other to inform iterations on our solutions. For phase 1 usability testing, we interviewed 15 people for around 30 minutes each. Users fit StoryFile’s target audience, and were either volunteers from company events or current clients. There was an even split of users who had experience with video editing to mimic the quantitative findings, and most users were not experienced with creating their own AI.
We created an affinity map to group the feedback of the 15 users tested, to identify key themes. Although all of the feedback was important, we decided to prioritize and act on the most impactful aspects of the design that affected its usability.
Key findings from these interviews include:
Because many users were new to either video recording or AI creation, they needed more guidance for next steps to take.
Our product’s AI value-add is not immediately clear, and users wanted more features that utilized our technology.
The visual design needs to be updated to match consumer expectations for our product.
Competitive Analysis
We conducted competitive analysis of other artificial intelligence companies and video recording applications and tools. We focused on analyzing their usability: How many steps did it take to complete a recording task? What standard were users expecting within a recording experience that analogous competitors like TikTok or Instagram might be using? What language did the AI companies use to make their pioneering technology easy to learn for new users?
Stakeholder Needs
Leaders at StoryFile expressed they did not want to change the core branding of the product yet—only to improve what was existing. Our goal as a product team was to upgrade the current product, but not so much that it felt different from the rest of the application’s UI.
For UX, our goal was to communicate all needs that we needed to improve, but strategize them so our most impactful features were prioritized.
Constraints
The Problem
Users need a simplified recording experience with clear guidance, to help make the process of creating an AI more clear and less daunting.
The Solutions
The previous record screens used dated design techniques, such as utilizing little negative space, no distinct CTA, chunky iconography, multiple rows of navigation, and an overuse of text descriptions rather than experiential recall.
These 3 themes were broken further down into features that were listed, prioritized, and incorporated into the final designs.
Updating the User Flow
Wireframes
The Proposed Design
My updated record screen designs keep the process of recording simple, with a more modern UI. Although I prefer even more minimal designs, this walks StoryFile’s UI in the right direction, while keeping the branding the company stands behind.
