uScreen is an online community where young people can learn about film-making by collaborating with their peers and industry experts in a safe creative environment.

Commissioned by ScreenSouth, who approached us a couple of years back with a vision to create a YouTube for young disabled people (on a budget): we took the challenge, together with Gamelab, of designing and developing a website that balances collaboration and sharing with safety and accessibility.

We engaged with young people with learning or physical disabilities to understand how they use the Web, which we discovered doesn't differ much from how the rest of us does. In fact, we scrapped a lot of assumptions and misconceptions, to realise that most importantly we had to keep webpages focused and content concise (avoiding distractions), and enable young people to customize their experiences (for instance, by making every sections of a page collapsible).

The result is a widgetized interface and a user experience that revolves around collaboration: people are encouraged to create projects and invite other members of the community to work together. uScreen is a starting point for them to learn about the film-making process, be inspired, find like-minded people near them and kick off their own projects. Within a project, they can create storyboards for others to understand their vision, and once a film is in the can or mobile, they can put it together in the Cutting Room and allow other uScreen members to join them in the process.

uScreen is built with the ExpressionEngine (EE) content management system, and it pushes its capabilities by adding a range of extensions such as Solspace Friends and Brandnewbox Followers, that enable social networking. We made tweaks to the Solspace Friends module and created our own extension, which lets users delete entries and comments without accessing the admin control panel. We have also built an API that enables the Flash tools built by Gamelab to read and write data onto the EE database.