The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is the organization that votes and assign the Golden Globe Awards. Each year they attempt hundreds of Movies and TV Shows and, on the month of December, they vote for the Nominations.
Process
Persona
Database
Programming
Screenshots
Problem
Each end of the year, members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) vote for the Nominations of the Golden Globe Awards. Throughout the year, they watch about 400 movies and TV shows, and they have to select their best five choices for each of the 25 categories. The total of the data (actors, directors, music, movie titles, and more) is quite large and could involve up to 2,000 voting options. Until now, HFPA members had to go through the manual voting process. The operation would take about 4-6 days of hard work and stressful time.
They decide to build a Digital Ballot System to improve the voting process and make it easier. When the HFPA become my client, I’ve heritage a Ballot System without instructions and presenting various issues.
First problem:
The Ballot System never worked properly, and the previous webmaster couldn’t fix it;
Second problem:
The interface wasn’t user-friendly plus not easy to learn, and nothing was indicating when the voting process was completed and finalized.
Personas
Brian Schmidt
Country: Germany
Profession: Journalist
Age: 64
Education: Bachelor degree
Brian is a german Journalist Member of the HFPA.
Mary Bradshawn
Country: Australia
Profession: Journalist
Age: 71
Education: Bachelor degree
Mary is a Australian journalist Member of the HFPA.
Solutions
1 – Software Solution
The complexity of this project required solutions with attention to details, security, and simplification. The first thing to do: find the bugs and fix them.
With my engineer, we performed reverse engineering, understand how the software works, replicated the errors and found the bugs.
Performing interviews with Members they reported that while they were going through the voting process, some of the selections were found unchecked forcing the Members to start again. Fundamentally, we understood that the software was unable to recognize users, with the result of been redirected to the same account. In short, all the Members were overwriting each other’s choices.
Problem found problem solved. We’ve corrected the flow, database and script side, and the system started working correctly.
2 – UI Solution
Despite the high number of categories (25) and data involved, I was able to design a user interface with all the functions in one page utilizing accordion option with included custom search, saving, and navigation, one for each category to avoid paginations and confusion.
To improve the visualization of the voting progress on each category, I’ve integrated colored backgrounds for the modal windows giving them the following values:
• RED: Entry or entries missing | • Yellow: Rating is missing | • GREEN: Completed
When all choices are completed, and all the background’s categories are green, the Member can finalize the process.
Screenshots
