Designing for Drag Queens

Designing virtual drag queen trading cards

User: Local Boston Drag Queens & Fans
Role: Interviewer - Designer - UX Researcher

- The Problem -

Local Drag Queens find it hard to compete with the hit reality TV show RuPaul's Drag Race, often struggle to make a profit, and feel like drag culture is only viewed in a narrow minded way.

- The Solution -

Monarch, a virtual drag queen trading card game that educates about diverse drag culture, has fans engage with local queens, and helps queens maintain their practice.

Background

UOCD (User Oriented Collaborative Design) is a class at Olin that guides students through interviewing a user group, identifying their needs and designing a solution to a problem they find. The user group my team and I worked with was Drag Queens. I spent the semester attending drag shows, visiting costume shops, and meeting some really interesting people. It was during this project that I found my passion for human centered design and engaging with users in order to produce the best possible solution-- one sticky note at a time.

Process

User Research

We started out our project by learning as much as we could about our user group. We interviewed 5 local drag queens, 2 regular students, 2 costume designers, 2 show hosts, and 2 RuPaul's fans. We used research methods such as card sorting, collaborative sketching, surveys, and discussion guides to understand what is drag means to each individual.

After researching, immersing, and building relationships, we organized our information using effective design frameworks such as personas, mood boards, journeys, and OCEAN diagrams. I was personally responsible for creating the personas and mood board. The purpose of the personas is to define the distinct areas of drag culture and design a product that is useful for each persona. The mood board helped us identify the patterns in drag culture by answering the question "what is drag?" with words such as gender identity, art, and political statement.

Patty: Performer with Purpose who's mission is to spread awareness about drag culture and LBGTQ rights

Daryl the Drag Racer who's does drag for a living and is constantly traveling for competitions

Arty the Artist who's passion is diversifying and educating others about all kinds of drag culture

Insights

Through group discussions, analyzing our frameworks, and checking against bias by constantly reviewing and asking for feedback, we were able to identify the key insights about our users:

Rather than the drag persona being a separate identity, drag queens see their persona as a magnification of themselves
RuPaul's has been both a blessing and a curse, shedding light to the art of drag but taking business away from local queens
Due to the extravagance of the costumes, queens spend a lot of time and money finding and creating their looks

Areas of Opportunity defining values and key insights

Areas of Opportunity

Our initial areas of opportunity were quite broad in range. Due to the scope of the project, we decided to focus on the hit reality TV show, RuPaul's Drag Race. Although local drag queens are thrilled that a new light is being shed on their art, they feel as if though all of the attention was solely focused on the TV show and not their own local and diverse performances. We chose this area because we felt it affected all drag queens in a significant way

Therefore, we created an Opportunity Area Statement: Our goal is to design a solution to the RuPaul's Phenomena by educating fans about diversity in drag and encouraging them to engage with local performers, all while profiting the drag queens.

Brainstorming & Ideation

Using our areas of opportunities, we began developing ideas through blue sky ideation in which we come up with all types of ideas (realistic and not), in order to understand the underlying solution. We then evaluated our idea using 2-by-2s, journey maps, and gallery sketches

Blue Sky Ideation Session

Final 3 gallery sketches

Design & Develop

In this last phase we developed, from the perspective of experience and interaction design, the most promising idea into a more-detailed product proposal. Again, our aim is to significantly better the lives of Drag Queens and do so in a way that captures and communicates our extensive thinking and relationships with our users.

Outcome

Using all of our new knowledge, we created Monarch: a virtual trading card game meant to channel the phenomenon of RuPauls Drag Race in local diverse drag scenes. Monarch will educate users about diversity in drag, entice them to engage with local drag queens, and thus helping drag queens make a profit.

My team and I on presentation day!

Spring 2018
User-Oriented Collaborative Design
Olin College of Engineering
Team: Tobias Shainsky, Meaghen Sausville, Henry Rachootin

Back To Portfolio