Finland’s National Broadcast YLE wanted to create a digital experience for upcoming historical drama series Seitsemäntoista (Seventeen), expanding on a storyline of two teenage women living in the civil war turmoil of Helsinki 1917.
Develop a concept that will engage a young female target audience.
Design a mobile web game experience, testing with a large user group, and lead the YLE graphics team to create and implement the UI.
01. Design Thinking Workshop
Asta Wellejus and I held a 3 day workshop with the YLE team in Copenhagen. The aim was to review the user research, align with YLE on the challenge and generate ideas to prototype and test.
02. Refining the concept
Based on concepts generated in the workshop, I produced a user flow to refine the idea and align the team on the core concept, paying particular attention to how users enter and share the experience.
03. Prototype Build & Test
On agreement of a fully formed concept, I built an interactive prototype with Adobe XD to test with the target audience in a formal audience feedback session. This was then shown to four audience focus groups of target users to get feedback.
04. Testing & Iterating
Users commented the outcomes could be a little predictable. To avoid this I designed an experience where on certain videos, 50% of the time a user’s in-game choice leads them to alternative content.
05. Designing the User Interface
To produce the UI for the game, I tested iterative designs using A/B testing techniques. I created a responsive web interface with the users, establishing a visual language familiar from social media.
Usability & Analytics Reporting
Once the design was implemented, I continued to interview users. When the game was launched, I combined this with available analytics to produce a usability report, with recommendations for further improvement used for the next series commissioned shortly thereafter.
Workshop techniques:
⚡️ Lightning Demos
🗣 Expert Sessions
✍🏼 Concept Sketching
📖 Storyboarding
Game launched in Autumn 2017 for mobile browser, to coincide with the broadcast of Seitsemäntoista.
Critically acclaimed viral-hit, reaching over 350,000 target users, over 100K more than our goal.
Won award for Best Interactive at the KOURA Media Awards 2017.
Commissioned for a second season.
Don’t just test outcomes with users - make them a central part of the design journey and co-create as much as possible.
Teenagers are an incredible diverse user-group – the attention span of a 13 yr old is radically different to that of a 15 yr old.
