Dayee Leung — Backstage Voiceover Profile

Context

The Backstage platform gives new talent access to creating profiles, jobs, auditions, and advice. Casting directors are able to easily access the thousands of talent profiles when scheduling auditions for their casting calls.

Backstage only had one talent profile type available for their users. Research showed many general profiles spanned a variety of skills, making it difficult for those with a specialized talent to highlight it in their profile. As a first step to allowing alternate profiles, there was a higher need and an industry need for Voiceover profiles.

My role and research

As design lead, I worked with the user researcher to come up with a list of initial questions:

What additional profile specifics are Voiceover users looking for? Which fit on top of the existing general profile format?
What additional search filters need to be added?
How to give Casting Directors a seamless experience accessing and viewing additional profiles?

Other questions centered around implementation restrictions based on current infrastructure: What functionality would be difficult/impossible to do? Which variables would be consistent across all profile types? How well will existing and new features scale?

Overview of current profile — what pieces could be potentially reused, what components/layout patterns do we want to reuse, how could this scale to other profiles with different emphasis? Current profile had huge focus on outward appearance and visual descriptors, making it difficult for those with a non-visual specialized talent to stand out with their profiles.

New insights:

Voiceover talent used both audio and video file types to share their work
New Voiceover talent may not have produced work to share, so we could provide them short scripts to create their first samples from
User type indicators/selectors was integrated in more areas of the site than expected: search filters, search results, profile, mini profile, casting calls, casting call applications, applying for multiple roles for one casting call, etc.
First launch, functionally user can only create a voiceover profile if they already have a generic profile. Later, will scale to allow user to jump flow and create only a user type specific profile.