The birth of an idea

In November 2015 Daniel Ramos, the CEO of the project, heard his friend Mike playing music on real nunchucks. Daniel was so amazed that he advised Mike to make a video and upload it on YouTube. What was next? As often happens, first Mike liked the idea, however, then he thought it was a waste of time and quit the plan. That episode became a turning point for Daniel. He came up with the idea of Uunnic, the global web analog of America’s got talents.

Reasons to change

Uunnic had an old-fashioned functional website, based on WordPress. Daniel Ramos was absolutely open for suggestions how to upgrade the website usability and style. So we took the lead and rolled in three UX directions: elaborate structure, easy navigation and responsive layout, as the Uunnic team was ambitious and would expect many thousands of users.

Potential of exploration

On YouTube the music related content is over 20% of all video hosting. The Uunnic team decided to follow the rules of industry. Therefore, the Explore gallery has sections for singers, musicians, dancers and performers. Also, visitors can search video by music style categories.

Becoming popular

In the Audition room users become judges. First, you watch a 30-second video and then estimate it with a tool which looks like an equalizer. It provides differential positive and negative rating using… SOUND. If you highly appreciate the video, wind the sound up till 5. If you dislike it, just wind the sound down. 10% of the most appreciated videos get to the ShortList where users can watch the whole video. In this chart each video has its own rate. Getting enough points video reaches the Explore gallery. Welcome to the top chart! Due to self-managing the system inspires users to be their own bosses.

Promotion

Sometimes video treats you so well that you’d like to support the artist. For that reason, we came up with an idea of boosting. Boost gives extra points which help a talented person to get to the top. Apparently, it is a limited operation. The most appreciated “Video of the day” as well as “Best videos” and “Latest videos” get to the main page so for artists who got there the chance to be seen by well-known producers highly increases.

Access to the industry

Uunnic changes the way artists are discovered and developed. Users can upload videos of their shy friends putting copyrights. The number of videos you can share is not limited, however first they have to be uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo. Fill in the send us talent form and post your friend’s videos. Just don’t forget to match the correct license type. This is the way how anyone can become a producer.

Getting feedback

It was a long and ambitious project during which the team at Heyllow always gave us support and advice in terms of design and user experience. The team worked very closely with us to come up with the best designs and create a simple user flow to provide the best experience when using the site. They are very good communicating and offer their advice and expertise for all small and big details. The best thing is we feel like they don’t work FOR us, they work WITH us, which makes them very valuable members of the team.

—Daniel Ramos, CEO & Co-Founder of Uunnic

Three critical functions of the brief

Understand the task: Maximize the client’s goal regarding the project, clearly form the TOR.

Build a relationship: Briefing helps you to show your competence and understand whether we will work with the client or not. 

Typify the client: We can conditionally identify three types of clients: win-win, lose-win, win-lose, lose-lose: 

• Win-win – is when everyone should get the benefits, the performer quality work in the portfolio, the customer – a cool product.
• Lose-win – in this case, the client is passive about his product, and the executor includes all his creativity for the portfolio. 
• Win-lose – this option works when the client makes a product by the designer’s hands, continuously adjusts all the work, and does not take advice from specialists.
• Lose-lose is a losing option. At the briefing, it helps to determine what the client and the customer will not work, for example, the vision of the product realization is different, or the work that the client wants requires resources that the company does not possess. And many other options. 

There are two other not so obvious problems related to the brief:

It’s worth taking it as a rough draft

The man sees your questions for the first time, many of them he may never have thought about. We return to this draft a few more times to clarify the details.

It’s essential to understand who your client is

Very often, designers do not notice that they are not talking to the decision-maker. And this is the person on whom the whole fate of the project depends. Ideally, to discuss the project with the person who makes the decision.

Design testing

Design testing is a check of layout for design compliance. A product designer is responsible for this.  After a developer has finished their work, a designer shall check if everything has proper appearance and shows appropriate behavior. If there are any questions, a designer shall report a bug or decide with a developer on the need to redo something. 

Typical problems that could be found during the design testing:

• incorrect spacings; 
• missed states on interactive elements;
• bad animation timing or easing.

Functional testing

This is to confirm that the software product being developed has the entire range of the customer’s functionality which is proved to meet all expectations. The key idea here is to make sure that the website itself works properly.

Examples of what may go wrong:

• a login form doesn’t allow the user to login with proper email;
• it is not possible to open a checkout page even though the products were added to the cart;
• literally any other functional or logical issue.

Image optimization

Optimization of images refers to the hygiene of a modern web app. Although the Internet nowadays is fast enough, you should keep in mind slow 3g network and places where people have to surf websites with limited Internet connection, such as the underground. If you can save a hundred or two kilobytes for your user, you must do it.

Here are a few tools that may help you to optimize your images:

• for NextJS apps: https://github.com/cyrilwanner/next-optimized-images
• for GatsbyJS apps: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/plugins/gatsby-image/
• for WordPress apps: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
• framework agnostic online tool: https://imagecompressor.com

Test Google Lighthouse report

Google can improve the quality of your web page. It has audits of performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO. In addition to the check itself, it provides developers with advice on troubleshooting which is very handy.

You can use it in a few ways:

• https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/rel=”nofollow” — for a detailed report on your performance;
• https://web.dev/measure/rel=”nofollow” — for an audit of 4 main categories: SEO, Accessibility, Best Practices, Performance (performance report is less detailed than in PageSpeed);
• and in a few more ways, such as in Chrome dev tools, as a NodeJS module, etc. Check out this article for more details https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse#devtoolsrel=”nofollow”.