“Open Mic” — Find Your New Favorite Comedian
Prototype App to find fairly “unknown” comedians that deserve your time while exploring Figma and what it has to offer.
What is “Open Mic?”
“Open Mic” is a prototype of an App that I created to help stand-up lovers find comedians that they have not heard of before. The name came to mind because at Open Mic Nights you never know who is going to go up and be next. There is something special about possibly finding your next favorite comedian randomly on a Friday night out. I thought this app could help create a similar feeling that going out would.
The general idea of the app was to ask a series of questions that could help someone narrow down to a single comedian based on things that they found funny or preferences in their comedians specifically. These preferences (for now) could be anything but for the purpose of the current prototype, could be based on specific kinds of jokes you like, whether they are male or female, or even if that person is a minority or if that wasn’t of importance to you.
Why were certain design choices made?
The project was designed to be quick to use and very simple. Most people that would download or use this kind of application are going to realize that this will be linking you to the work of the comedian that you get narrowed down to. This will cause you to leave the app once you find your comedian and you wouldn’t need to revisit the app unless you are looking for another new comedian. Because of this, I decided that the app didn’t need to be difficult to use and is more of a tool to guide people, instead of trying to gather all of every comedian's work onto a single app. There are already apps that aggregate clips and specials (namely Netflix, Comedy Central, and YouTube). Because of this just pointing people in a good direction seemed like enough.
When it came to specific design choices like the color or logo used for the app, they both came from previous projects found here. Since this was one big overarching project, I thought it would be wise to keep what I could to be the same color scheme (though I did decide to go with a different name than the podcast linked earlier). The buttons I designed are a linear gradient that I thought worked well with the “neon” theme that I used, which in turn, made it feel less serious and more fun.
What was the reasoning behind choosing to make this?
Why? There is always an answer to this. I created this because I wish there was something like this for me to use. One of the downfalls of traditional stand-up comedy is that unless you are either going out to comedy clubs every night, or a stand-up is posting new content regularly on social media, you are going to go through all the content that was “good enough to post” pretty quickly. Unless you have many different comedians you listen to, you are going to run out of content fast. Something like “Open Mic” would help you discover more and more comedians so hopefully, it will keep you busy until your favorite comedian's next Special.
Conclusion
Working through this project made it very clear to me how my personal design process works. While working it is much easier for me to flesh out the whole idea via notes on my phone or notepad to make sure that I have all angles and all pages that I will need in order to work in a timely manner.
I also learned a lot about Figma over the past few days working on this assignment and things that I did and didn’t like about the tool. I think as a prototyping tool in general, its better than Adobe XD, but I think I would still prefer to use XD due to the integration that it has with the other Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Also, Figma performed pretty poorly when zoomed in or zoomed out. I don’t think it was my computer (more than capable of prototyping) and was very annoying when trying to use it for long periods of time.
There are also some things that I would have changed if this was something that I would be expecting to release and have others used. The survey system has you pick things in order to narrow down to a single comedian. If I were to restart, I’d have a list of comedians, and in the beginning, I would have grouped them into categories based on their similarities, then I would have designed a way for you to see all the comedians in a similar category and maybe a percentage for each rating how close of match you were out of 100%. That way you wouldn’t have to go through and retake the survey every time, but do it fewer times, and be able to explore them on your own based on your interest.
All in all, I’m very happy I did the project and who knows, maybe something like this could be really amazing in the future.
Link to the Prototype: https://www.figma.com/file/gmuoAxIJqkEtMaM7hZQZmN/Open-Mic?node-id=0%3A1
