I took the initiative to lead the creation of a national digital Movie Release Calendar which turned an essential sales tool in the form of a static, un-filterable, often wastefully printed PDF (sorry Treebeard) into a device-agnostic web application generating instant filtered movie slate results that account director’s can easily share in seconds while still in the pitch meeting.
My Roles
- Innovator/Ideator
- Interaction Designer
- UX Designer
- UX Researcher
- Primary Stakeholder
Role Summary
Responsible for the entire lifecycle from ideation/innovation and initial sketches to low/high fidelity prototypes, to business case and executive pitch/buy-in, to research and synthesis, through to production-ready code and launch plan of this game and business-changing digital product.
Problem
The original Movie Release Calendar (MRC) was always a static, printable PDF document that needed to be manually updated and generated on a weekly basis as movie release dates change frequently. As a result, those critical movie release dates cannot be dynamically updated to reflect those changes which makes it nearly impossible to seal the deal on advertising around any future movie title. Also, as a result of its static nature, the data on the MRC cannot be intuitively searched nor sorted based on user-desired relevance (e.g. rating, genre, release date, studio, etc.), nor can any trailers be played to truly get a taste of what the movie is about in the sales pitch.

Prototype
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.
I started with sketching some rough ideas on paper, then onto low-fidelity wireframes. Since the intention from the beginning was to empower the Sales Force to access this product on whatever device they happened to be on, I made both desktop and mobile versions. From there, I went on to quickly put the initial draft of high-fidelity interactive prototypes together in order to show proof of concept, validate my idea as well as pitch to executives (including CEO) for buy-in. Since the M in MVP stands for Minimal (not Maximal) viable product, I kept it very simple and to the point.

Solution
Design and build a public-facing web application utilizing Noovie API's to source all movie data needed by the app, providing a simple, searchable/filterable information resource that's accessible on any device. The powerful app provided current movie release data digitally that is fully searchable, sortable and sharable, and play compelling movie trailers on the fly (not possible in a PDF) which helped boost excitement and multiplied biz deals in on-site pitch meetings.

Outcome
The mobile nature of this dynamic tool greatly improved the time and efficiency for sales people, particularly when they are remote and especially while in the field in an important client pitch meeting. It also served as a planning tool for the creative team working on creative campaigns.
Lift
- 90% reduction in process time per week for dozens of employees
- 20+ hrs per week saved on direct labor for several employees
- Reduced waste up to 96,000 printed sheets of paper per month
- Branded NCM as a forward-thinking data-expert media company
