TV Shows that Inspire UX Designers
(I tried my best to not give too much away on the TV shows but there are a few spoiler alerts.)
TV shows can help translate unique situations and ideas into reality. These can inspire UX Designers to see how design and technological problems that characters face can affect the current world. There are fascinating tv shows applying technologies in innovative and exciting ways.
How can Social Media go wrong in the future?
Black Mirror, a show on Netflix, provides fascinating stories of how future technology could negatively impact society. One of my favorite Black Mirror episodes is NoseDive because it exhibits a unique twist on social media. The basis of the episode is about how all individuals manage to live their lives through ratings for survival. The protagonist Lacie values her smartphone as her survival wallet because it displayed her social media statuses and ratings. These were used to help Lacie earn a steady income, order food, make friends, and all other necessities in her life. Lacie believes that high ratings would bring happiness into her life. As Lacie’s ratings were going up, she receives an invitation from her friend Naomi to be her maid of honor at her wedding? However, when Lacie left her home the ratings started to decline. Will Lacie make it to Naomi’s wedding on time? I will let you watch the rest of the show in your free time. While you are watching the show, notice the unique rating functionalities of Lacie’s smartphone when she is paying for her coffee at the café. The other important scene to observe is when Lacie meets her ratings’ advisor, he shows the dashboard on her ratings and implements strategies on how she can improve.
MacBook Spying on Your Kid’s Whereabouts
My favorite family show is modern family because it portrays well on how 3 different families go through unordinary dilemmas in today’s modern world. The episode that resembled a user journey experience of the MacBook in investigating her missing daughter Hayley was called Connection Lost. It provided a clear visual on how Claire Dunphy used her MacBook features such as the iCloud, FaceTime, and, social media. The entire episode takes place in Claire’s MacBook screen while she is waiting for her flight back to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Claire makes FaceTime calls to her family in seeing how they are doing and if any of them knew about Hayley’s whereabouts. She starts using her parental control instincts on her MacBook to investigate Haley’s whereabouts. Claire looks into her messages and videos to examine the reasons behind their recent arguments. Claire went into Safari to access Hayley’s Facebook through her fake profile to see Hayley’s dangerous activities. Claire decides to go extreme and signs into Hayley’s iCloud to detect her iPhone GPS. This revealed unforeseen surprises that concerned Claire in discovering the mysterious story behind Hayley.
The App Idea is Clever but the Users still don’t get it
Silicon Valley show is about Richard who created an app, Pied Piper, that provided a unique data compression algorithm and built a startup company around the idea. This episode, Daily Active Users, provided an incredible example in UX Design by not providing clear feedback. Pied Piper debuts a new ad platform called Tables. Despite the initial success, the Pied Piper app was not seeing a sustainable number of users. Richard and Monica (board member of Pied Piper) decided to arrange a focus group to gather feedback on the platform. However, Richard realized that he forgot to provide the beta version for regular people. This resulted in the users unable to give feedback on the app. When the group finally gave the feedback that conveyed in usability confusion then Richard decided to allocate his funding for educating the public on how to use the Pied Piper app. This episode can teach us the warnings for forgetting to produce a feedback feature on mobile apps.
Conclusion
Remember, tv shows can implement a visual story on how UX Design could apply unique situations in peoples’ daily lives. Black Mirror episode on NoseDive provides a rational what-if scenario on social media going way too far by having ratings and rankings to survive society. The Modern Family episode on Signal Lost demonstrated a user journey on how Claire used her MacBook to discover Hayley’s whereabouts. Silicon Valley show taught a unique lesson on how Richard forgot to provide a feedback feature on Pied Piper app. Overall, an important lesson to learn from TV shows is that any failure you experienced can open up as a new learning opportunity.
