Veriscouts website
Responsive website with a vision to create an independent currency of trust in the entertainment industry. Veriscouts is a digital platform that brings one artist with another together to foster trust and inspire collaboration by writing honest and anonymous reviews.
Process
Target audience: adults ages 20-35, models and photographers who work full-time, are hip and tech-savvy. They are looking for new collaborations and writing reviews.
Core Features
Write anonymous reviews
Look up information about talents
Send direct messages
Create a profile and portfolio
Read reviews
Apply for castings
As a model myself in past, I was pretty familiar with the fashion business, but I needed to dive deeper to understand critical pain points and general attitudes towards gig-related resources and how our users navigate in the industry. I reached out to my network as well as Facebook groups to find participants for this study. Pretty quickly we got a decent number of survey responders and set up remote 1:1 interviews with 8 people. Here are some questions that I asked:
How often do you have photoshoots?
How long have you been in fashion?
What motivates you to do so?
Tell us about your last photo shoot.
What was the big problem in that process?
Tell me about your most successful collaboration and why it was a good experience?
What are you looking for when choosing a model/photographer?
Can you explain why?
What was the hardest part of finding a model/photographer?
Which resources do use to find gigs?
Why do you like it? What is the hardest part?
Did you find an alternative solution?
Have you ever felt confused while looking at modeling/photographer’s career and/or TFP boards?
What did you do afterward?
Can you please finish the following statements:
I’m interested in learning how to reduce this type of experience because…
I was in the shooting and this happened...
Let’s say you want a new photoshoot you’ve got an idea, Talk to us about your approach to going through this process.
What are the most critical pain points?
Competitive analysis
Backstage
Backstage is an online platform enabling actors to find career advice and casting information with many different filters you can use to find casting calls that are perfect for you? However, this site does not provide talent reviews and most roles are for theater productions and indie movies. Besides, it has an expensive membership (160$/yearly) that is tricky to unsubscribe.
Casting Networks
Online platform for casting and auditioning for the entertainment industry. It offers communication, talent submission, scheduling, audition management, and secure video sharing. But like Backstage they do not provide a review system and they charge 25$ to create an account with only one photo. Which not really valuable for artists who want to showcase their work.
Model Mayhem
Model Mayhem is an online platform that is useful for networking, most of its services for free. MM has a good search engine, when you scroll down, you’ll see all sorts of selections such as genres, compensation, and experience. MM has been around for decades, therefore, its age shows and too "noisy”. But a lot of the site’s traffic is men looking at nude or semi-nude photos. There have been a bunch of really scary stories in the news about models going missing when they went to meet up with people they met on Model Mayhem.
Personas and use-cases
Wireflow
Use-case
Last week someone told Alexandra about Veriscouts. She never heard about it before, and apparently, there are numerous benefits like a free platform to build a portfolio, find castings and read reviews. She goes on Veriscouts to learn more about it. Alexandra likes Veriscouts and has been using it for a few days now. She wants to want to contact the artist and apply for a casting.
Use-case
Seth found Veriscouts through word of mouth and instantly likes the design. He decided to leave a review on his colleague with whom he collaborated in a previous set. He uses the search bar and clicks on the profile to read details.
