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Whatnot Universe
Whatnot is an online livestream shopping marketplace. For six weeks, our team of 3 designers was tasked with imagining a “10-foot” experience for Whatnot.

Or; live shopping, welcome to the big screen.
ROLE
Designer & Brand Strategist
TIMELINE
Oct -> Dec 2023
SKILLS
UI/UX
TOOLS
Figma
01.
Prompt
10 foot experience.
Re-imagine the social marketplace experience: expand from the mobile device to a more comprehensive “10ft experience.”
Whatnot TV
02.
Solution Preview
tl;dr
Light social shopping on your home TV.
Form watch parties to shop with friends and experience Whatnot together in real time.

Easily jump between streams to keep the party going.
03.
User Research
Identifying our key stakeholder
The elderly? Families with young children? College students? We explored various potential stakeholder groups.

We settled on young adults who live alone for their appetite for streamed content and social desire.

Whatnot had yet to capture this market segment.
Stakeholder brainstorming.
Interviews & polling
We conducted user interviews and social media polling for our target users between ages 18-31.
‍
We asked which contexts they watch TV in, their watching habits, how they interact with their TV, and what they wished was different about their TV experience.
Some of what our interviewees said.
2. External research
We also conducted broader external research to understand the deeper behaviors, trends, and habits of our target users.
PAIN POINTS
01.
Isolating
Online shoppers are shopping alone, while shoppers at retail stores and malls are almost always with friends or family.

Social fulfillment is one of the only things keeping people in brick and mortar stores: how do we replicate that?
02.
Monotonous and disengaging
Online shopping feels monotonous and disengaging.

Users turning on their TV are unlikely to engage with online shopping if only to be pained by endless scrolling and decision paralysis.
03.
Lack of online relatability
Users prefer to watch content that feels “real”: livestreams, reality TV, etc.

They seek companionship and trust. How might we responsibly develop these parasocial relationships between buyers and sellers?
HOW MIGHT WE
How might we make livestream shopping social, low-effort, and immersive, in mimicry of in-person experiences?
04.
Development
Double diamond design process, the process we used to design our final solution.
Ideating around an improved experience
Then, what could we offer from a 10 foot experience?

Our ideas ran rampant: AI pals, Spotify car mode ripoffs, bidding wars, and exclusive brand partnerships all crossed the table.

We landed on Whatnot Universe, an immersive private group watching experience.
Snippets of our ideation process.
Our first idea that we designed was actually SmartStream, a "smart" endless livestream that would play videos recommended to the user. When we showed this idea to users though, they didn't like it.

They still wanted control over the videos they saw, especially since Whatnot streams are not purely entertainment, but actually a product advertisement. Plus, SmartStream didn't address the isolation pain point-- it was still an individual experience.
05.
Solution
01.
Enter WhatNot Universe
To start the Universe experience, users can click the TV icon in the Whatnot app.

After connecting to their TV, the Whatnot mobile app acts as a supporting remote.
02.
Start a watch party
Create a room for your friends and join the private voice chat automatically created for your party.
03.
Enter a stream
Choose a stream from suggested streams curated from your group’s watch history, or just dive in and see what happens!
04.
Jump across livestreams
When the group wants to move on,  Whatnot Universe makes it easy to vote on suggested streams and enter the next one seamlessly.
XYZ
Whatnot Universe is a livestream shopping TV experience that fosters a light social environment among friends inspired by the experience of in-person shopping.
Final prototype
6.
Evaluation
Considering space
Full screen mode?
The biggest challenge with a 10 foot screen? Allocating screen space.

We wanted a cinematic experience, but needed to preserve navigation and shopping functionality.

Maybe the answer lies in a toggle-able full screen mode?
Revisiting our initial goal: to parallel the in-person shopping mall experience.
NEXT STEPS
01.
TV-mobile interaction
People are on their phones when watching TV, and the opportunity for finer remote control with a phone is promising.

Research: where is technology headed and how can we leverage it to create a seamless mobile-TV experience?
02.
Reverse research
Ask our users:

Why don’t they watch TV?

Why do they play TV as a background sound?
03.
Private chat, public chat
Based on WhatNot’s current chatting feature, what does chatting look like?

How can public and private chats work together, rather than against each other?

And where does voice fit in?
Signing off,
Elissa
Crafting experiences & growing
communities with pixels, “words”,
<code>, and interactions.
emartial@usc.edu
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Elissa last cleaned around here in January 2025. Let her know if you catch a bug! Recruiting-season mode is currently off. For case studies, email me!
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