Category
UI/UX Design
Project Duration
7 weeks
Client
Student Project
Team
ABOUT
An app based on the infamous Leopold & Loeb case, aimed at a niche yet growing audience of international fans of Thrill Me, a musical production inspired by the case. This app ties the connection with scenes from the musical to the real psychiatric reports of Leopold and Loeb, providing in-depth insight into the characters.
ROLE
Took part in researching and developing insight into connecting the case files to the musical, as well as developing the user persona. Created the landing page for the report page, and designed assets for the dual-screen psychological report.
CASE STUDY
RESEARCH
When first ideating this app, we went on a research to find a niche that would be interested in an app version of the book. The book content covers a wide range of information from the criminal methods, the psychiatric reports of Leopold and Loeb and the court case that became the first trial to implement psychological profiling for defence in history.
INSIGHTS AND PERSONA
We found contents online that covered the trial and the true crime, but one notable content that came to our eye was a musical called “Thrill Me” inspired by the case. We found out that there was a large group of musical fans from East Asia who came in contact with this case and was eager to learn more about the characters. We identified the niche and looked for issues that they face and changed them into a strategy for building our app. We found two issues:
Lack of resources for International Audiences | Lack of Focus in Leopold & Loeb’s Psychiatry |
|---|---|
Despite the case having international interests—specifically in Asia, with the popularity of the “Thrill Me” musical, there are barely any resources catered for non-western audiences. | Many existing content focuses on ‘how’ the crime happened, and less about the ‘why’ the crime happened. The book also separates Leopold and Loeb’s analysis, making it hard to compare the two side by side. |
We formulated a user persona to further solidify our design strategy.
IDEATION
We decided to ideate an app that ties the musical content to the book content, as well as implement a dual screen design for the book content to compare the two characters side by side. For the book content we decided to focus solely on the chapter about their psychiatric reports and omit other content.
OUTCOME
Through focusing on a hyper-specific audience, we were able to design an unique app dedicated for musical fans who are interested in learning about the original history. While this app may seem niche and novelty-like, this app system can be translated to other historical plays (such as Hamilton, Six, etc.) or even movies.