The New Face of Anime Binging
Funimation redesign
Roles: Sole UX/UI Designer
Tools: Figma, Maze, Adobe illustrator
Client: Personal project
Timeline: 3 weeks
Funimation Global Group, LLC is an American entertainment company that specializes in the dubbing and distribution of East Asian entertainment media most notably Japanese anime. For years the name Funimation has been synonymous with quality content. This should be no different when it comes to their application to watch that content.
The current version of the app has very little in the way of accessibility, feels clunky to navigate due to the outdated navigation bar. The overall look and feel also needs to be modernized.
Our audience is comprised of people who like anime, age ranges from 18-55. This includes people who are new to anime and those who are anime veterans.
A fully redesigned UI with accessibility and modernization in mind.
Creating a user survey gave me the opportunity to gain a broad starting point of just who my users are, some insights to their needs and wants as well as the best starting point to help them have a better user experience.
From there I wanted to check out the competition and see what was working well, and what wasn't in terms of features as well as the user interface. I looked at the main competition in the same space, Crunchyroll and VRV.
There are many reviews on each app store discussing the UI having significant issues. This is one of the primary reasons I felt the UI needed to be modernized. Later we will discuss UI Improvements and design choices.
With the power of caffeine, ramen, and research on my side it was time to form our personas. The information I had gathered at this point was more than enough data to build out user goals, motivations, and pain points they may encounter.
To prepare for some user stories and flows and really get a sense of how our users might feel going through the process from downloading the app to all the way to watching their first episode on the app.
We will answer these questions as we go along and more but for now let's start with our user stories and flow.
I already had some anime in mind as well as the colors I would be using because I have been a long time anime and Funimation fan. I wanted to stay true to their signature purple and white. From there it was a matter of pairing those with some secondary and accent colors.
A link to the full script and responses can be seen here: User Testing Report.
After the testing, I removed the rating system for the time being. You can also now only cast from an anime that has been selected.
I added labels to the navigation bar and altered the coloring to assure it passed AAA for accessibility checks.
We now have an app with fully dedicated anime title cards for those who struggle with accessibility and reading the titles on the images themselves.
For this 3 week design sprint I just kept thinking of better ways to do things no matter how subtle, even when I wasn't at the computer this project was in the back of my mind. For the sake of not causing you any cognitive overload, I have the links to the first iterations below. Followed by the 5th and current iteration in the slider below.
In the A/B test, the new design I created outperformed the current funnimation app 64% to 36%.
Please enjoy the video of my prototype in action!
This has been by far, the most challenging and rewarding project I have ever worked on. It pushed me to learn, focus on the research, iterate, and most importantly reminded me that not everyone has the same mental model and therefore you need to be ready for anything while testing. I am extremely proud of the product I created and I believe with the results backing me I have improved upon the current application by modernizing and most importantly tackling some of the major accessibility issues. What I would like to revisit is my rating system, I think it would be a nice addition to my app features. I also thought being able to add spoiler free comments on episodes would be a nice community feel feature.
