The Junket App
Role | Product Design Lead
Client | Special Treats Productions
Outcome | Prototyping, Designing and building a live event scheduling and planning web App
Methods | End to End Product development | Stakeholder management | Iterative Design | Prototyping | User Interviews | Wireframing | Usability Testing | UI Elements Design |
This web app, designed for Special Treats, enables the PR firm to smoothly run Junkets involving on-camera interviews with talent by international journalists. It handles challenges like shifting journalists, overtime interviews, breaks, and technical issues, allowing producers to react quickly and efficiently.
A PR Junket is an event organised by a PR team where journalists and reporters are invited to interview the film's cast and crew. These interviews are often used for promotional purposes leading up to the film's release. Running a PR Junket can be incredibly complex due to the numerous interviews scheduled in multiple locations, often hotel rooms, over a short time. Journalists transition from room to room, interviews may run overtime, breaks are needed for talent and staff, and technical issues may arise. All these factors contribute to the complexity and require quick, effective responses from the event's organisers.
To thoroughly understand the project and its complexities, we conducted multiple workshops with Special Treats Producers. This gave us a comprehensive understanding of their challenges and needs. Throughout the design process, we shared our sketches and ideas, receiving continuous feedback from the team.
We developed a sophisticated web app that allows a PR company to manage a junket in real-time, adjusting to a constantly changing schedule. With this app, producers can pre-assign journalists to rooms, time each interview, monitor which journalist is in each room, track if interviews run over their allotted time, schedule breaks, and move journalists between rooms in real-time. Previously, producers managed these tasks with pen and paper. So, transitioning to software that provides a quick, real-time response was revolutionary.
We created a working prototype and tested it with the producers, simulating a live junket. This process helped us identify usability issues and informed subsequent modifications. The developers were involved in the prototype testing, which helped them understand the usability issues and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges.
This project was designed in collaboration with John Fass as part of our joint work as No More Heroes.