Being paid in the TV and Fim industry is hard to track. The traditional payment methods are manual and not transparent enough for all users that are involved.
It is expensive creating contracts between the IP owners and producers/distributors because lawyers have to often be involved and this slows down the process.
The team at Hieros want to automate this process and make it as transparent as possible, allowing users to see how much income they have earned and what the income is for.
During discovery which is an intensive couple of weeks, I identified, challenged and de-risked the business model.
Part of this being, creating personas and deep diving into who the users actually are and how they will use this product. I did this so that I could step into the shoes of the end users and see what features this product required to be useful for them.
Although initially, I discovered a lot of different users would be using this product, I narrowed it down to the main three (IP owner/Agent, Producer, and Distributor) and created personas for them.
In collaboration with Hieros, I created a user journey map for each of the personas to further understand how they will interact and move throughout the product.
We looked into how each user might find the platform, use the platform and any interact with any after service. I chose this style of user journey because I wanted to understand in depth the path a user would take to reach their goal.
I then wanted to validate this user journey with real users who fit the personas.
Hieros had a wide variety of contacts of people in the TV and Film industry who fit the personas perfectly. I interviewed Producers, Distributors and an Agent. The interviews were one-on-one to ensure I could really unpack each users thoughts and feelings.
The majority of the user journey was confirmed during these interviews. The one thing that did come out of these interviews is that the users were not as interested in viewing trending data as I had assumed.
I de-prioritised this feature for the prototype and decided to focus on registering the IP, creating contracts and receiving income.
After I had validated the user journey during the user interviews, I facilitated a feature mapping workshop with Hieros to decide on what features would be included in the prototype.
I prioritised the features that the users had shown interest in and had advised they would use.
The additional features split out into future phases which we will again prioritise after user testing.
The information architecture was designed using the decided features in the feature map so I could then go on to creating the wireframes.
Lo-fi wireframes were designed using the user journey and information architecture.
After conducting and analysing the research I found that users wanted something that was quick and easy to use as they have very busy lives.
They also wanted it to be transparent and easy to understand where their money is in the payment chain.
The solution was to create a user-friendly product where IP can be registered in a matter of minutes and a contract can also be created within the portal.
This allows users to keep track of their work as it is all in one place and they can use their phones to be notified of any updates.
Hieros are using this prototype to gain investment for the build phase of the product.