If I can dream
One house in Hollywood. Five people aspiring for fame. Sixty HD cameras, rolling 24/7. All feeding an always-on, virtual-meets-reality experience. If I Can Dream was reality TV, reinvented for a digital-first world.
What American Idol would have been...
When Simon Fuller (not to be confused with Simon Cowell) originally had the idea for American Idol, he envisioned a world where fans could follow up-and-coming stars on their path to fame, and aspiring stars could use their fan-base to propel them to stardom. But in 2001 when the Idol series became a reality (first in Great Britain, then in the US), the internet wasn't ready to support his vision. By 2010, the internet was a vastly different place, and with the help of our team at POKE NY (now known as Makeable), If I Can Dream was born.
The UX Process
Bringing If I Can Dream to life proved to be a massive undertaking. My primary roles as part of this amazing team were strategy and UX design, a unique challenge for the IICD experience due to the digital representation of a physical space.
Early Prototypes:
In order to help us envision what it would be like to walk through a digital representation of a physical space, we started by "building" variations of the digital house in paper...
Wireframing the IICD Experience:
Working hand-in-hand as our designers concepted the digital experience of the house, I was tasked with creating wireframes of the site experience. This too proved a unique challenge as we wanted the wireframes to also provide a means of working with partners to create placements of virtual objects — digital representations of real-world objects like a guitar that hangs on the wall — throughout the house. As such, the wireframes were designed to be printed, allowing notes and objects to be placed (and erased) on a transparency layer attached to each page. (Click here to explore the entire wireframe document.)
Bringing together the wireframes and prototypes:
Once we locked in the paper prototype and the wireframes, we began work to combine the two into a digital prototype of the experience.
The Final Product:
After further testing and experimentation, we ultimately simplified the design of the digital house. Here is the final experience...