MOBILE STREAMING APP
Mulberry Theatre
Short Drama Streaming App (Redesigned)
Mulberry Theatre is a short-drama streaming app project I worked on during my product internship at COL Group.
The project aimed to explore a new domestic short-drama app that could turn the company’s existing short-drama and IP resources into a more direct mobile viewing and monetisation experience. My work focused on low- and high-fidelity interface design, improving content browsing, and making key features easier to access.
Timeline
From early product exploration to interface design iteration during my product internship, while supporting multiple AIGC and content-platform related projects at the same time.
Background
COL Group is a leading Chinese digital content company with strong resources in online literature, IP development, copyright distribution, and micro-drama content. Its associated overseas platform ReelShort has become one of the leading examples of Chinese micro-drama platforms expanding internationally.
To create a new growth and monetisation channel in the domestic market, the team explored an independent short-drama app where users could browse, watch, continue episodes, and access key platform features more smoothly.
Short-drama users usually make quick decisions based on covers, titles, genres, episode progress, and update status. Therefore, the design challenge was not only to make the interface visually cleaner, but also to help users discover interesting content faster and reduce friction from browsing to watching.
Move your mouse left and right to explore🕹️
The original project was completed during my internship, where I contributed to low-fidelity wireframes and high-fidelity UI screens for Mulberry Theatre. As UI trends and front-end technologies have evolved rapidly over the past two years, I revisited the project as a redesign.
The redesign keeps the original product direction while improving the homepage playback logic, content discovery flow, visual hierarchy, and mobile-first interface details.
This section explains how I approached the redesign, from understanding mobile short-drama behaviours to planning key flows and refining the interface design.
Project understanding
I first analysed the product goal and core user scenarios. Since short dramas are mainly watched on mobile phones in a vertical-screen format and during fragmented moments, the interface needed to support fast browsing, quick content judgment, and a low-friction path from discovery to watching.
Requirement Clarification
In this stage, I focused on user experience planning, including clarifying user needs, breaking down functional modules, and organizing the overall structure of the product. Considering the nature of short dramas—quick start and fragmented viewing—I proposed placing “Continue Watching” and “Viewing History” directly on the homepage to reduce the time needed for users to resume content. Meanwhile, recommendation and exploration features were separated into a specific page to keep the homepage focused on immediate playback needs.
Design & Planning
Based on this understanding, I focused on reducing the distance between opening the app and starting playback. For returning users, the homepage should help them continue watching as quickly as possible, rather than asking them to search for the last drama again. This led to the design direction of using a lightweight auto-play mechanism, supported by a circular auto-play countdown, so users can clearly understand that the drama will resume after a short moment.
Wireframing & High-fidelity UI
Based on these decisions, I created low-fidelity wireframes to define page layouts, information hierarchy, and key user flows across the main sections of the app. After the wireframe structure was confirmed, I participated in the high-fidelity interface design for the main app pages. I contributed to refining the visual hierarchy, drama card layout, typography, spacing, and action buttons to make the interface clearer and easier to scan on mobile screens.
The resulting AI-powered scheduling app offers a seamless user experience, allowing individuals and businesses to effortlessly manage their schedules.
Quick Resume
The homepage highlights “Continue Watching” and “Viewing History”, allowing users to quickly return to the last drama. A circular auto-play countdown gives clear feedback before playback resumes automatically.
Personalized Discovery
The Discover and Search pages recommend dramas based on users’ preferred genres and tags, helping them find suitable content without spending too much time browsing.
Reduced Decision Cost
Quick playback entries and preference-based recommendations help users start watching faster and find suitable dramas with less hesitation, matching the fragmented nature of short-drama viewing.
Move your mouse left and right to explore🕹️
View larger
Back to Homepage