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Brief
BrewAR is a suite of augmented reality experiences designed for the LA Independent Beer Festival 2025 to envision a dynamic festival experience.
I served as an Experience Design Intern at Reality Experience Design, working with a team of reality designers on BrewAR. I lead the concept and was the primary level designer behind the experience.
My Role
Experience Designer
Reality Designer
3D Modeler
Tools
Lens Studio
Blender
Figma
Scope
3 Months
BrewAR at LA Independent Beer Fest
Explore
The redesigned homepage provides clear context for the Library Foundation's mission on the splash page and highlights trending topics tied to current news, events, and featured content, encouraging user engagement.
GIF of Experience or Video of Event
Topic
The redesigned homepage provides clear context for the Library Foundation's mission on the splash page and highlights trending topics tied to current news, events, and featured content, encouraging user engagement.
GIF of Experience or Video of Event
Problem
Reality Experience Design (RED) blah blah
Solution
Streamlining access to recordings and content with an automated tagging system and redesigned website sections with enhanced search and discovery.
Impact
I outlined processes and tools to enhance accessibility and awareness for LFLA to hand off to a design agency.
Final Designs
FINAL DESIGNS
Prototype
Encouraging Engagement with Trending Topics
The redesigned homepage provides clear context for the Library Foundation's mission on the splash page and highlights trending topics tied to current news, events, and featured content, encouraging user engagement.
Improving User Retention with Tags for Episodes
To encourage users to continue browsing other related episodes on the archives, I added recommendations for related talks and relevant tags to keep users engaged on the site.
Robust Search Filter System for Discovery
Allowing users to filter their searches helps them quickly find specific notable speakers and topics of interest, enabling them to explore digital media content by media type, genre, and sub-genre.
Tagging System Implementation
For my final deliverable to ALOUD, I presented the methods for categorizing their digital media collection. I recommended that ALOUD uses automated tools like Kontent.AI to help streamline cost and manpower for tagging their collections.
Google Spreadsheet of organized archive content.
Option: Manual Tagging on Spreadsheet
Manually tagging content is low-tech and easier to learn for the team with more accuracy.
Kontent.AI platform automated tagging demo.
Recommended: Automated Tagging Tool
Using automated AI tools like Kontent.AI offers more efficiency for tagging their content.
Style Guide
To reflect the diverse perspectives and stories within the audio collection, I rebranded the ALOUD Archives as Voices ALOUD. I introduced a gradient design featuring purple and green, symbolizing intellect, as the central theme.
1
Research
Stakeholder Meeting
Heuristic Evaluation
Competitive Analysis
User Surveys
Subject Matter Expert
2
Synthesis
Key Insights
User Journey
3
Ideation
Goals
Solutions
4
Final Designs
Prototype
Design System
5
Reflection
Outcome
Conclusion
Research
RESEARCH
Stakeholder Meeting
To kick off the project, I met with the Library Foundation ALOUD stakeholders to have a conversation on issues that they're currently facing with their digital archives. Through this conversation, I found several key challenges that their team faced that led my design process.
RESEARCH
Heuristic Evaluation
Before starting to design, I first looked at the ALOUD Media Archives page to explore the user experience. After performing an evaluation, I realized how limited the functionality and features for the archives were with many missed opportunities to improve the discovery flow. Their website suffers from usability issues lacking robust search and discovery features to engage with content.
Current ALOUD Archives homepage
RESEARCH
Competitive Analysis
I looked at other existing digital media collections and museums for comparison on how they structured their gallery and their search functionality features. Through this, I was able to prioritize features such as a robust tagging system for contents and homepage topic recommendations to explore as solutions for the archive's challenge with discoverability.
RESEARCH
User Surveys
In order to understand the current ALOUD audience and their awareness of the archives, I conducted user surveys on guests who attended live events at ALOUD and via members that are subscribed to their email channel.
Results of user surveys conducted on ALOUD attendees at live event
What I gathered from the surveys is that ALOUD attendees primarily engage with content to discover new ideas or hear from specific speakers.
RESEARCH
Subject Matter Expert
The Hammer Channel is a grant-funded initiative to improve access to the Hammer museum's programming. I reached out to the creator of Hammer Channel, Philip Leers, to learn more about the design processes and strategy behind creating their digital media archives.
Synthesis
SYNTHESIS
Key Insights
Following the interviews and research, I synthesized the information into three key insights to guide my ideation process in defining goals for the ALOUD user experience and exploring solutions.
SYNTHESIS
User Journey
I created a journey map to understand how the target user, current ALOUD attendees who are lifelong learners, engage with the ALOUD archives website.
Journey map of ALOUD attendee experience from live event to post-event
I found that there were many missed opportunities in expanding the reach and awareness of the archives for attendees and ways to extend the experience after the site with community engagement features like sharing videos & clips.
Ideation
IDEATION
Goals
I defined main goals for the design to improve the tagging system and discovery flow in order to increase engagement with the content on the digital archives.
Design Goals
1
Create a robust tagging and content organization system.
2
Help users discover old content with better search filter system.
3
Build features to enhance site navigation and engagement.
Exploration screen of four solutions for the archive redesign.
IDEATION
Solutions
In the design phase, I created low-mid fidelity wireframes to explore how to enhance the current search filter system and improve engagement on the website.
Homepage Recommendations
ALOUD archives homepage trending episodes
Before
Current trending episodes section is limited to a few episodes with no context.
Redesigned ALOUD archives homepage trending episodes
After
Redesigned trending episodes section provides context and trending topics for relevance.
Search Filter System
Current search filter system on ALOUD archives
Before
Current search filter system limited by media type for tagged content only.
Redesigned search filter system on ALOUD archives
After
Reimagined search filter system allows user to search by topic, artist, date, and location with recommended terms.
Episodes Transcript
Current episodes page with limited playback features
Before
Current episodes page has limited features for engaging with content and no discovery flow to other episodes.
New episodes page with transcript, tags, and recommendations
After
Redesigned episodes page has transcript feature for searching through recordings and recommended tags and similar episodes to encourage discovery.
Reflection
REFLECTION
Outcomes
Strategic Roadmap
This project provided the ALOUD team and their creative agency with a clear roadmap, prioritizing key challenges in the discovery flow and tagging system to ensure long-term success.
REFLECTION
Conclusion
Clear Communication to Deliver Impactful Solutions
Collaborating with the ALOUD team involved open communication and careful compromise on what features to prioritize. This process taught me how to focus on essential features, align diverse goals, and ensure everyone’s input was acknowledged.
Designing within Constraints
The ALOUD team's limited manpower and resources challenged us to explore systems that could be implemented rather than a complete rehaul of their system such as the automated tagging system using AI tools to enhance efficiency.
Value of User Research
Through stakeholder interviews and user surveys, gaining insights into the needs and pain points of both the ALOUD team and their audience was essential. This research emphasized the importance of organizing content effectively and ensuring better search capabilities.
Next Steps: Advancing the ALOUD Platform
If given more time, I would further iterate on the tagging system to incorporate more advanced AI-driven categorization for greater accuracy. Additionally, I would enhance the search functionality and explore user-driven personalization features to create a more intuitive user experience.
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