The Client

WriterDuet is a company that maintains a screenwriting platform (called WriterDuet) tailored towards professional, semi-professional and amateur screenwriters. The platform provides unbeatable tools for collaboration and customization when writing feature films, TV pilots, stage plays, anything.

The Project

The founder reached out to me to help design a new product from WriterDuet called “ReadThrough”, which acts as a place for writers to house their completed scripts. The platform includes several features, including a way to easily collaborate with other screenwriters, hire voice talent to act out parts in your scripts, and it also features a peer-to-peer script marketplace where users can give and receive paid and unpaid feedback. This feedback marketplace is what I was hired to help design.

The Team

The team consisted of the CEO, who was the primary Stakeholder and also the lead engineer. They also had:

• 5 part-time / contract full-stack engineers
• Two additional designers
• One product manager
  

My Role

The team brought me on as a Content Designer / UX Writer because they needed to add clarity, apply voice and tone strategically and unify the language across the site…

But they also needed someone who understands design from a more holistic perspective and who has experience in the domain of screenwriters / entertainment. Having spent 8 years in TV Writers’ rooms and having written professionally for television, they sought both my design expertise and my domain knowledge.

The Users

There were two main users that this product aimed to serve:

1. Non-professional / semi-professional screenwriters looking for a place to collaborate with others and get script feedback.
2. Professional and semi-professional script readers, whose goals are to:
   

              • Earn money for giving script feedback

              • Expand their network of promising screenwriters

              • Share their skills to help young writers succeed

Business Objective

In order to get the feedback marketplace up and running, the CEO wanted to prioritize the Reader side of things first, logic being that if there were no Readers on the marketplace, it would be very hard to convince Writers to sign up for the platform.

They also wanted to allow script readers to customize their submission forms; the forms that writers fill out to submit their scripts for feedback.

User Research

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(There was none)

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At the time I joined the team, they hadn’t committed any time or resources to user research or even secondary competitive research for that matter, so empirical data was nonexistent.

But...

But having worked in the industry for many years, I have plenty of friends who are amateur screenwriters… So I conducted my own research.

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The results were entirely anecdotal (most of which happened over the phone off of these text chains), and of course limited to the experience of my immediate network, but the data I gathered played a crucial role in shaping my process.

What was my process?

I'm so glad you asked. I started by designing user stories and task flows for two users/use cases:

User Story #1

As a Screenwriter who focuses on TV comedy, I want to get notes on my 3 pilot scripts so that I can improve the scripts and send them to lit managers to get repped.

User Story #2

As a Script Coordinator who has written an episode of TV, I want to give script notes on comedy pilots so that I can help novice writers improve their craft while making a little extra cash on the side.

Form Builder

The Stakeholders wanted to create a submission form builder to allow readers to specify the types of scripts they want to receive and the types of feedback they’re able to provide. The reason for creating this form builder was to allow for unique use cases:

• Screenplay competitions
• Screenwriting classes
• Writing groups

The Problem

But customization and flexibility comes at the cost of usability, and the initial solution the team built before I came aboard was not cutting it.

It’s pretty easy to see why landing on this page for the first time would confuse any user visiting the site:

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The Calls to Action are incredibly vague

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The language is foreign to those in entertainment

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The user flow presents enormous cognitive load

Someone using this platform for the first time has no idea what to do next...

The obvious solution: 

Templatize that ish!

So I set about redesigning the copy, content and quite a bit of the flow itself in the submission form creation flow:

• Designing a default submission form to reduce cognitive load
• Clarifying the purpose of form creation for people who have never gone through this process
• Guiding the Reader through the process to explain what a form is and why it's needed

I designed a simple form creation flow that captures all the steps needed to create a custom form and no more.

I made sure to clarify why a submission form was needed in the first place:

I added copy to each step of the form creation flow to ensure the purpose of that step was clear.

I also designed a submission form template to reduce cognitive load:

I revised all CTA's for clarity and specificity:

You're welcome, usability.

Some other incredible things I accomplished:

Added a Summary/Confirmation page to improve visibility of system status:

Designed all email notifications:

All in all, I designed over two dozen email notifications

How did I do?

Of the goals I set out to achieve:

• Redesigning the submission form creation flow to be clearer and more easy-to-use
• Editing copy across the platform for clarity and actionability
• Designing email notifications for all possible notification types

I achieved ahead of schedule and to the satisfaction of the key stakeholders

But more importantly...

I helped steer the company in a new direction, pushing them towards a reduction of interface complexity and towards a streamlined user experience, setting up guardrails to reduce cognitive overhead.

If I had more time...

I would validate my design decisions and establish a voice and tone guide to set the company up for success in the future.

Overall, though, I was thrilled by the opportunity to work on such an ambitious project.

Thanks, and feel free to check out my other projects!