The least exciting part about getting nominated for an Oscar is the stack of paperwork you have to fill out before it’s official. In 2019, I helped the Academy of Motion Pictures transition its nomination acceptance process online.
(All opinions in this case study are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)
I conducted stakeholder interviews and evaluated designs through usability testing as the team’s only UX designer. I also created user flows and wireframes for new parts of the site, while our visual designer Kaylynn Sheets improved existing pages. I worked with a web manager and developer to clarify interactions and design specs.
This project took place from October, 2018 to December, 2018. The site went live to nominees on January 22, 2019.
The Nominee Central site lets nominees accept their nominations and manage their Oscars experience, but only 46% of nominees used it to complete their acceptances in 2018. I wanted to increase the completion rate, because it would cut costs by reducing the membership team’s workload.
With a 3 month timeline, we focused on uncovering what users and stakeholders wanted out of the site.
To assess the problem, I looked at Google Analytics to see what users were doing on the site. I was surprised to find that only 46% of nominees accepted their nominations on the site the year before. The problem was much more serious than we thought.
This quantitative data told us what users were doing on the site, but I needed to fill in the why.
Due to the high-profile nature of our users, we aren’t able to conduct research directly with them. Instead, we needed to think outside the box to understand their pain points and create empathy.
We did this by first conducting interviews with our membership team, who were stakeholders as well as valuable user proxies. Since they were in fairly regular contact with users, they could speak to users’ frustrations on the site.
The feedback we got suggested that users found the process lengthy and confusing.
We had a few hypotheses as to why the acceptance rate was so low, but couldn’t fully validate them without input from users. I turned to our next best alternative - usability testing.
Usability Testing
Usability testing would likely expose the most severe problems that our users would encounter, even if it was just with friends and colleagues. I put together a rough script and conducted tests with three participants - two employees from other teams and one generous friend.
We found that participants weren’t clear about the site’s purpose, and got insight into what exactly users found confusing.
We were under pressure to make minimal changes because development resources were spread thin. To accommodate this, our initial plan was to go for the low-hanging fruit and focus on fixing simpler usability problems.
We went over the usability problems discovered during usability testing and ranked them in order of severity and dev efforts. Our visual designer Kaylynn and I were then tasked to find quick fixes to improve usability and condense the welcome walkthrough.
But this approach made me nervous. I think it made all of us nervous.
I realized that if we continued designing without prioritizing users’ goals, we weren’t going to make a difference for users or for the business.
Before we went any further, I led the team through a collaborative exercise to identify our assumptions of what users’ goals were. Listing them explicitly revealed a large disconnect. If the user’s main goal was to complete their award acceptance so that all necessary paperwork is in order and they don’t miss important deadlines, our site wasn’t helping them achieve that easily.
We were afraid of putting all our eggs in one basket, so we came up with a new strategy to minimize risk. While our visual designer helped the rest of the team work through the most severe usability issues, I could branch off and ideate, prototype and test ways to increase the acceptance completion rate.
Method - Sketching interfaces
I started by sketching my ideas on paper instead of using a wireframing tool, because it helped us evaluate and iterate on the designs quickly, without getting caught up in visual design. It also pushed me to consider a broader range of ideas. We held these sketches up to our pain-gain map to decide which design we would move forward with.
(Our developer Hope even joined in on ideation! Her first-ever sketches coming soon)
Method - Hi-Fidelity Mockups
I used Sketch to create detailed mockups to get the greenlight from stakeholders, who were more comfortable with hi-fidelity deliverables. To communicate the design to our developers, I brought the mockups into Invision to create a prototype and worked face-to-face with them to work on interactions together. This approach worked well in reducing the time it would’ve taken to create detailed design specs for handoff.
After I finished some sketches, I presented them to my team and we evaluated them against the primary user need. Ultimately, we all agreed to move forward with the onboarding flow I sketched. Not only would it affirm the user to complete their acceptance early on, but it also capitalized on the user’s initial excitement to hopefully increase the completion rate.
I then brought my sketches into Sketch to flesh out the user interface. Usability was key in this onboarding flow, so I added clear section headings, grouped related questions and broke the form up into more manageable chunks. I referenced the existing site and our style guide to inform the visual design.
With less than two week to launch, our visual designer Kaylynn continued to refine the typography and brand elements, while I created a prototype in Invision. We used this prototype to convey the flow and interactions with our developers, supplementing with in-person communication when more clarity was needed to cut down on heavy spec docs.
Our main dev Hope worked through the weekend and well into Sunday night. The site went live to nominees at 6AM on Monday morning.
Getting nominated for an Oscar is both incredibly exciting and overwhelming. Start your journey on Nominee Central by accepting your nomination and making sure its nothing but smooth sailing until its showtime.
Straight to the Action
Before you do anything else, fill out the digital paperwork so that you’ve officially accepted your nomination. It’ll take 5 minutes, tops.
Make It Your Own
No more content hidden behind locked doors. Discover nominee-only events and create your own Oscars experience.
We’ll Save You a Seat
RSVP to events to let us know you’re coming. Come back anytime to update your guest information or preferences.
Outcome
As acceptances on the site poured in over the next week, we had an 85% acceptance completion rate, a huge increase from 46% in the previous year. According to the membership team, the changes we made significantly reduced their workload and saved them countless hours during their busiest week of the year.
Reflections
While I wish we could have done more validation and testing prior to launching, working on this end-to-end project pushed me to draw upon many methods from my UX toolkit. I learned to factor in more time for steps like validation, which often get cut when short on time, for future projects.
This project demonstrated how user centricity is essential to both users and the business, something that my team and I will continue to improve on an org-level.
