ThinQ.tv • Gianmarco Minin

2019

Livestreaming and Donations

In my senior year at ASU, I volunteered at Crowdpublish.tv, an ASU Venture Devils startup that looked to connect authors, directors, and other creatives to sell exclusive content, perks, and crowdfund new content. In my time on the project, it evolved to also include joint livestreaming for these creators.

My role at this startup — later known as ThinQ.tv — was to improve the user experience. While originally brought on for user interface design, throrough digging through the codebase and touring the front end led me to focus less on the visual points of the app and more on the functional aspects.

Overall, I revamped the codebase for consistent and accessible styling, defined the user flow, integrated the new livestreaming feature, and started work on updating the UI and branding.

View Contributions on GitHub

Onboarding Experience

An immediate pain point I identified was users' confusion about what ThinQ.tv was for. As evidenced by the various pages with app directions, such as the About, FAQ, and Topic Suggestions pages, it was something the team knew before I joined. Reading paragraphs of text is overwhelming and exhausting, so my goal was to provide all of this information when it was most useful to the user.

Before

After

Style Refactoring

Despite importing Bootstrap and SASS gems, the project utilized neither when I joined. Pages were all inline styled and used vanilla CSS. The majority of my work besides user flows and research was put into restructuring the project's style files. My goal was to build an atomic design system where colors, spacing, typography, and various components and styles were defined at a low level as SASS mixins and could be overridden for unusual circumstances.

Before

After

Component System

Rebrand

The project did not have any branding but a purple star when I joined. As a Venture Devils participant, we pivoted to a gold and maroon color scheme as a homage to ASU's branding. I selected a simple, wide-open serif to keep the interface easy to read and reduce decision paralysis while we worked on backend functionality. When the project eventually was renamed to ThinQ.tv, the whole team iterated through a few designs, settling on a mind/thunder motif to represent the brainstorming conversations our app was meant to encourage. I finalized the logo into a more modern low-poly design.