URBANWORLD.COM
Urbanworld Group.
Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Web Site Design, Co Location, Managed Services and Media Coding

Urbanworld Group, a Sony Entertainment Holdings portfolio company, asked me to help them extend the equity of The Urbanworld Film Festival, the largest minority film festival in the United States, to the Internet and the World Wide Web. I worked on virtually every facet of this new service, including its functionality, interaction, presentation and graphic design, co location and media coding.

At the begining of the project, we knew that we only had three months to define and implement the entire service architecture. The vision for the site was a gateway between the "worlds" of exceptional minority film makers and audiences. In this community, the advent of digital film making was known to be blurring the distinction between producers and consumers. Building on this insight, we knew that the rich exploitation of metadata within the user interface would enchance the information experience and serve as "magnet content" enticing the target audience to add additional value in the form of reviews and ratings.

One of Sony's requests was that all the functionality of the site had to be scalable in two dimensions. Using a four-phase approach to performance management, we developed several scenarios that showed different ways to accomplish this while remaining focused on time to market and buget constrains.

The Urbanworld Film Festival has made its mark as the largest minority film festival in the United States. The festival has been the launching pad for such box office successes as: Soul Food, Hoodlum, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Down in the Delta and Why Do Fools Fall In Love.