The Bruce Lee Estate Archive



Highlight contributions

Concept iteration, Wireframes and journey flows, Communication with stakeholders (cross-functional up to C-level), UR Management.
Prototypes: desktop, mobile, OTT, wearables.

My Role

Sr. Product / UX Designer




Why

The estate of Bruce Lee has over 14,000 digital assets (and triple physical assets) that it uses for social posts, licensing, museum exhibitions worldwide, and other partnerships. The estate therefore also has a vested interest in being the authoritative source on the life, work, and image of Bruce Lee. Our challenge was defined as creating a storytelling device to activate these assets based on those interests.




Goals

To provide great, high-resolution assets including images, film, and sound in a way that connects in a meaningful way to Bruce Lee’s history; to thoughtfully connect Bruce Lee as a martial artist, actor, philosopher, and father to the popular imagination; to curate these narratives in a fresh way that rotates and makes sense over time on desktop, mobile, and wearables, with a concept build out for OTT devices.



Research

We did some (admittedly fun) research on how some celebrity archives and estates were taking charge of their materials to drive content and available information. Some of the people we looked at were the Neil Young Archives’ fun and engaging site as well as John Lennon’s official instagram. Neither of these were delivering the quantity and breadth of our vision per se, but the idea was there. Then we looked at some resources well-known for their depth and rigor on the academic research end -- sites like JSTOR, the Getty Archive, or the Smithsonian Archives. This taught us a lot about how to organize growing amounts of information, but they were much fun or very visually-centered. We realized we needed to strike a balance between the two worlds and that visually compelling presentation was going to be key.

 
  



Testing Strategy

Meetings were arranged with stakeholders to firm up prototypes and iterations and balance these ideas with realistic deliverables given the small size of our in-house content creators. How many assets did we want to share publicly? Would it be browsable or meant for research? Could it be both? Would it be fun? Was there an opportunity for paid upgrade feature? We created several personas based on limited but reliable data from our online store. 73% of our online store traffic came from our social (over 20M fans across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook) so we were able to put up a  questionnaire gathering data on our users’ location, age, sex, income, and self-identified Bruce-expert level that received 2,000 responses. From this information we built out some reliable general-fan personas.


Next we conducted testing with two important groups in the top teir of the general public: (1) our already-established ‘social micro-influencers’  which were 32 high-quality users who have 2,000+ followers on their Bruce Lee-fan social pages) and (2) Thirteen high-quality licensees who routinely engage in Bruce Lee licensing deals netting profits for the Estate annually. These articulated users vetted the fun-factor, the in-the-know-fan-factor, and the is-there-a-need-factor for the public archive. From there we polished concept and designs and took the browsable feature and the ‘My Archive’ feature to UserTesting.com and conducted these as unmoderated A/B tests and concept tests.