For these reasons and others, I’ve been gravitating to making short videos that explain my ideas or the ideas of my clients. You may already be familiar with a video that I made to explain what I do. In this post, I’ll share two recent videos I made for Sprout and little information about how they came together. Here’s the first one:

Make an outline

The most recent video I made was for Sprout’s new HTML5 product offering. Due to some rather insane deadlines I was up against, this video came together in about a day and a half of solid work. I started the process by trying to write the story out point by point. I tend to write these stories as bullet points that fit together sequentially into an argument. Sometimes there are sub-bullets that get moved as I rearrange the narrative. On a high-level it’s very similar to an outline.

Say it out loud

From there I use Garage Band on my Mac tell the story conversationally based on the bullet points. It usually takes me 4-5 times through to get something that feels right. In genera, two minutes is about the longest I’ll try and go. Once I have the audio sample in that range, I bring my computer over to the white board.

Sketch to your voice

I like to put the audio recording on repeat while I start capturing ideas of how each frame might progress into the next. Outside the storyboard frames, I capture the visual elements of the story. In this case, I had a designer, a computer, mobile devices, an ad server, and software icons. I also brought in a call out box which is part of the style guide at Sprout. Here’s one of my storyboard sketches for the HTML5 video.

You should keep sketching until you can see the story unfold in your mind. You’ll notice little arrows at the bottom of some of the frames in my sketch, these indicate how the transitions will take place. I also use little call outs to capture other details.

Collect your assets

At this point you should know what you’ll need asset wise to tell your story. I recommend getting as many of your assets up front so that asset procurement won’t slow you down once your in the groove of building the video. This can involve some design time for the icons, elements, etc. Once you’ve got everything you need in place it’s time to get into the tool you’ll use to make the video.

Keynote

I’ve been using Keynote recently to build these videos. I’m not sure if this is the best tool but it was available, fast, and easy to use. The main problem with Keynote is that you have to start the animation from the beginning each time you want to check your timing. That’s annoying, but if you’re only working on a two minute video it shouldn’t be that bad. Alternatively, you could use a more powerful tool that has a broader feature set. If you’ve got one you like, I’d love to hear about it.

Once you’re in your tool, you’ll want to start by dropping in your sample audio so that you can get approximate timing for transitions. With a time-line in place, you’re ready to start building your presentation and bringing your story to life.

Output

Once you’re done building your first draft, I recommend showing it to a bunch of people to get feedback. I usually go through at least three iteration cycles before I have something solid. The final steps involve recording a clean copy of the audio and matching the timing on the transitions precisely to what you’ve built. Here’s the HTML5 video based on the above storyboard:

Thanks for reading and I hope this gets you inspired to make some videos of your own.

Granted, it had some issues that prevented me from fabricating another one out of duct tape, but it was clearly good enough to keep me from making something better until it literally fell apart. It’s amazing how durable duct tape is! One downside of the material is the fact that it can get a little sticky at the edges where the adhesive is exposed. It also tends to stretch out over time which wasn’t ideal. Ok, so on to the next generation!

Before fabricating something usable, I decided to make some prototypes out of paper to determine the best possible fabrication pattern. Now that I was going to use a sheet material (rather than strips) the parts would be quite different. I can up with four potential fabrication plans which put the seams in different places … and one that was made from a tube of fabric. Some required glued, or bonded, seams others did not. Ultimately, I settled on a minimal design that requires only six straight-line sewn edges, or six heat-bonded seams depending on the fabrication material.

The final design uses lass material, requires three pieces of material and includes several other improvements. These include:

1. better business card protection due to a slightly deeper pocket.
2. reduced lint/dirt contamination due to openings at the bottom of the pockets.
3. slimmer, due to less material used.
4. better edge protection for bills due to outside seam placement.
5. easier card access due to shortening of the inside pockets, fabric with less friction, and the removal of triangular cut outs.
6. more durable, due to synthetic fabric.

Now that I’ve got a super solid design that I’m happy with, I’m looking forward to moving away from the white material (which was helpful far marking) and fabricating samples in higher fidelity with the use of a heat cutter and sewing machine. For those interested in seeing some of the process I went through to get to this design, I’m including images of some of the earlier prototypes below.

Earlier Prototypes

When should we be thinking in terms of the final (manufactured) design and when should we be thinking in terms of the design that is required to test and get feedback on the concept? You see, we’re planning on doing a short run of the device (say 100 units) so we can do some testing and it doesn’t make sense to have them cast. Following this, we have to change some elements of the design to accommodate manufacture by other means.

Should we have two separate prototype paths? In reality, the details aren’t THAT different but it can be confusing because we haven’t been good as saying “with respect to the testing prototype, I think we should …” My gut tells me that we just need to add some structure to our process to resolve this issue for now. But, you do have to wonder how to balance your time and effort between the two prototypes.

Is it a marketing issue? Some of the details in question are purely aesthetic or at least partially aesthetic and it’s unclear how much weight to give them. Though clearly, that’s more of an issue with the manufacturing prototype. There’s also the issue of cost of goods sold and how our choices will effect that. Our designs have evolved quite a bit so we haven’t had the chance to speak with potential manufactures about the impact of our choices. My partner is an engineer, but still we don’t really have a sense of if we’re talking about dollars per unit or cents for some of our choices.

When should we think about cost? For me, and with regard to this device,  it boils down to the fact that no matter what we do our device will cost significantly less than other devices in the same category …. so I’m not really worried about cost too much at this point. Maybe that’s wrong, but it seems to me that we should come up with the “best” solution and try to control costs from there. I guess this stems from my belief that people are willing to pay for great products and that pricing is in large part irrational (refer to Predictably Irrational if you want more on why).

I welcome your thoughts!

I also want to put out a big thank you to our presenters and to San Francisco Social Media Week and the San Francisco Chapter of the American Marketing Association for their help getting the word out. And, thanks for Justin.tv who produced the live video feed which is archived below.

My presentation
Building Brands on Social Networks
Note: the video from the event did not start until part way though this preso, so we’ve added the audio to the slide deck on slideshare.

Alexandre Roche’s presentation
Dog Book: Lessons Learned from the Popular Facebook Application
Twitter: @alexroche
Facebook: facebook.com/alexandre

Deborah Schultz’s presentation
It’s the People Stupid

http://www.slideshare.net/debs/its-the-people-stupid-1431852

Twitter: @debs
Website: www.deborahschultz.com

Kaz Brecher’s presentation
Rock The Space Toyota/MySpace from the Schematic Perspective

Archived video from the event at Justin.tv

Personas

Personas are fictitious characters, or archetypes, that represent user types that might use a product or service. These are useful as design targets, meaning they serve as a means to considering how different personas might respond differently to a particular design. Ideally personas are based on research, they are not just invented based on anecdotal experience with your users.

Personas are useful not only to infer how users might respond to features or experiences, but also to help validate design concepts. Obviously, this will not replace actual testing with real users, but it might help head off issues before you get there. Another key benefit of personas is that they enable designers to have empathy with potential users because they feel like real people.

Here’s a personas overview diagram to keep on hand while your creating them:

Personas are not without their critics. Some people feel that they’re not scientific enough to represent your audience and can therefore be misleading. I don’t disagree with this, but I think the real value in creating them stems from the process of thinking deeply about how users react differently to products and services. Another potential issue to watch out for is letting the personas get in the way of user engagement. In other words, creating personas does not mean that you can stop engaging with users. Personas are a moving target that must be updated regularly  through engagement. For those interested in learning more about this, and some research that has been done on the effectiveness of personas, visit Frank Long’s research paper.

User Dimension Scales

Personas are useful to understand your user community. User dimension scales are a way of plotting your personas across a variety of user dimensions. As you can see in the diagram below, there are five dimensions listed with three personas listed on each dimension. Going through this exercise can help highlight where personas are similar or different.

I hope this comes in handy and please comment if I’ve missed anything important.

1. It’s Only an Outline – The outline below is fairly straight forward and is designed as the starting point to a significant conversation about the creative work of branding. Filling in the outlines may require some serious soul searching for your organization, in combination with some exercises, but that’s not the focus of this post.
2. It’s For You Too – The design brief is as much for you as it is for your creative team. In other words, starting a creative brief is about being prepared before engaging a creative team. It’ll save you time, communicate that you’re organized and professional, and raise the bar for the relationship. Once the conversation gets started your creative team with typically iterate, improve, and possibly re-articulate the brief based on additional questions and clarifications.

Also, a big thanks to Jon Scheuning over at Pentagram who got me thinking about this when he shared a creative brief outline that he uses with me last year.

Let’s Clarify Some Terms

People use the word “branding” to mean differnt things. This is what I mean:

• Re-Brand – This is when a product or service that is sold under one brand switches it’s affiliation to a new brand. Often the goal here is to reposition the product or move upmarket.
• Brand Refresh – This is when an existing brand has fallen out of date and requires reworking to update it to contemporary standards. Brand refresh can be a regular review process to evolve a brand to reflect market change.
• Brand Re-Staging – This is similar to a brand refresh, but is more focused on altering the context and supporting brand elements associated with the brand in order to evolve it. For example a brand identity mark, or logo, may remain essentially the same while the supporting brand elements (pallet, patterns, secondary elements, backgrounds, etc) can change significantly.

Structure for The Brief

The creative brief anticipates a series of high level questions, so each section is positioned as an answer to a question. I’ve thrown in some sample answers to give you the gist of what good answers might look like. As a general rule, keep the language as active and as concise as possible.

What we want (what are your highest level goals?)

• Develop our identity system to support our next stage of growth.
• Make the system, and its associated assets, accessible, thus enabling consistent application.

How it will help our business (what are the expected business impacts of this project?)

• Drive consistent brand experience across touch-points.
• Build on existing brand equity and support line extension.

What we’ll get (what are the deliverables at the end of the project?)

• A re-staged brand identity that
  • includes a broader visual vocabulary than the current system.
• A style guide, including
  • a color palette set,
  • primary and secondary type faces,
  • imagery,
  • a series of exhibits and templates,
  • a selection of sample applications including _____, ______, ________.
  • a set of brand guidelines, to help our internal team apply the system across a variety of media.

Some Boundaries (are there any limits, or major specifications, that we must incorporate?)

• The brand mark will be used extensively in rich media and must be able to support animation builds.

Who this is for (tell us about your target market?)

• Our services are targeted to _______ audiences, here’s how they typically discover our brand, here’s how they perceive us now, etc.
• Here are the markets we’d like to move into, here’s how we’d like to gain brand awareness in this area, etc

Make the right impression (how do you want people to respond to your brand?)

• Our business is complicated and hard to explain, we want a brand that will support simpler communications.
• Different communities interpret our brand differently, which causes problems. We’d want a brand that is perceived more consistently.
• We want something that lets people know that we’re committed to doing well by doing good.

We’ll know it worked when (how will we know if it worked?)
To be successful, the restaged brand identity system should:

• increase perceived value of our brand and recognition through internal surveying,
• increase consistency across communications, and
• win strong internal buy-in.

Who we are (can you summarize what your brand is about?)

Our company was founded in ______ by _______ with a strong record for ________.  We have grown into ________. As we grew, we developed a logo, and used it to put our stamp on identity materials across a variety of media. To this point, these materials have served our needs, in part because ________. Recently, we began  diversifying our practice from a traditional focus on ________, seeking clients who work in adjacent industries, serve market sectors and geographies in which our brand is relatively, or even completely, unknown.  To meet this challenge, we need a more ______, ______, and _______ brand identity system.

What We Do (can you summarize your business?)
Our company is unique in_________. We also ________. Here is how we currently describe our services: [insert company boilerplate]

Our Personality (pick five words that summarize your ideal brand personality)

• Smart
• Frank
• Frugal
• Fit
• Pragmatic

Our Values
 & Mission (summarize your values and mission)

• Insert existing company boilerplate

How we fit in (summarize how you are positioned in the market place)

In our industry there are three kinds of service providers, those that are seen as ______, those that are seen as _________, and those that are seen as _________. Relative to these perceptions we are positioned as _________.

A list of companies that do what we do: (list the top ten companies you see as your primary competitors, and peers?)

• Company
• Company
• Company
• Company
• Company
• etc

What I want is a tool that applies fairly simple existing technology to help sort my content streams by relationship groupings that I can set up myself. This would allow me to quickly filter my micro-streams to see just what’s being said by my local friends, my Boston based friends, my marketing industry colleagues, or by my office chums.

It turns out that you can do this for Twitter on your desktop with tools like: Nambu (Mac Only), TweetDeck, and Seesmic. In Facebook, you can create a friend list, and then show updates for that list …. but it’s three or so clicks away from your main stream (thanks to Dan Harrelson for this info). But …. and this is a big BUT ….

It hasn’t hit the mobile environment yet  So, I’ve thrown together a quick prototype of the kind of thing I’m looking for based on the Twitterific iPhone App. In this example, I’ve pulled in my groups from the addressbook of the phone but it would make sense for them to sychronize with my desktop tool.

I’m sure something like this is coming along any minute now. What we’re really headed towards is the ability to pull together a quick huddle of a specific group of contacts, so that I can hear just them for a moment while the crowd continues to chatter away. Actually, I really like the name “huddle” somebody should use that.

Getting back to “users”, Jesse mentioned a joke that is often cited in the design world, which two professions refer to their customers as users? Designers and drug dealers. Obviously, this does not reflect well on designers. Jesse, however, did his best to accept the term by pointing out that “consumers” is not appropriate because it implies that all they do is consume (i.e. gobble up products and crap cash a la ClueTrain Manifesto). This is obviously not the case when you consider the tidal wave of consumer generated media online, which I prefer to refer to as “user generated content.” “Customers” doesn’t quite work either because not all “users” are buyers. Finally, one good thing about the term “users” is that it implies use, function, and purpose.

Listen to Jesse’s talk here:

(c) NY Times An artist’s rendering of an automated service island for a retail store from Intel and Frog Design.

From My Art

Back in 2001 I exhibited an installation entitled ROOM for which I created an initial experience designed to take the viewer’s mind off what they were thinking about before they arrived at the gallery. I used to think of it in culinary terms as a “cleansing of the palette”.  As they walked through the gallery entramce, they would see a video camera obviously positioned above the doorway. Once through the doorway they were confronted with a video screen that was obviously getting a video feed from the camera over the doorway. But something was off because the video showed someone walking up to the doorway, but there wasn’t anyone behind the viewer. Most people then noticed something very familiar about the person on the screen, it was them! What was happening, was that the video was delayed by about 15 seconds. The effect of this experience was intended to be jarring enough to distract viewers from anything they might have been thinking about before entering.

Mirror Stage

Mirror Stage is a simple concept that uses a similar video delay to improve the interaction customers have with mirrors in  retail clothing stores. The system uses an inexpensive camera that is embedded in the center of a flat screen television, along with a hacked Tivo box. A customer would walk up to the screen to see how a piece of clothing looked on them. They would use the screen as a mirror. What is unique about the system is that there would be a button on the wall that would allow the customer to delay the video (essentially hitting pause, then play on the Tivo). This would allow them to turn around and then look back at the screen to watch themselves turning around for themselves! No more adjusting mirrors, or twisting your neck to see your own reflection.

I though it was a rather clever idea, but never really got the project off the ground. I think the next generation of  kiosks is a great place to revisit the concept though, especially considering that the experience of watching yourself in delay is highly engaging. The NY Times article also talks about a partnership between I.B.M and EZface that allows kiosks to offer virtual makeovers. Basically, it takes a photograph of the customer’s face and allows them to digitally apply cosmetic treatments.

UPDATE: MarketingVox: a dressing room technology that made me laugh …. and maybe cry.

The Marketing Value

It goes without saying that the marketing value that could emerge from these new kiosks is significant. Simply understanding the kinds of questions that customers are searching for in-store versus online should offer insight into how to improve customer satisfaction. In the article Frog’s chief creative director talks about how sophisticated the online retail experience is (for example, the way it makes recommendations) and how that experience has not been available in store previously. It’s a good point, and one that deserves analysis based on use.

Beyond that, I  see how such as system could drive real-time layout changes in the store based on what customers are trying on most. Of course, it could also allow them to see the store inventory, and divert purchases online when the desired item is not in-store. I also think there are interesting opportunities to bring community into the experience, use analytics to return value to customers through the display, and connect the expereince customers have across touch-points.

1. SERVICIZE IT:  Part of what sets the device up for success is that it’s positioned to turn a product into a service. In this way, its reminiscent of the first iPod which took most of the features out of the actual device and relocated them in the management software, iTunes (the service). This may seem obvious today but at the time all the mp3 player manufactures were competing on how to get more features into the player, which was a losing proposition. In the case of the Nike+, they’ve taken the idea of defeaturing the device even further. The device itself has no display and no interactions. You simply put it in your shoe. The display of your iPod can then offer information about how far you’ve run, how many calories you’ve burned, etc.
2. ACCESSORIZE IT: One beauty of servicizing is that it also opens new revenue streams. For example, users can download PowerSongs from iTunes which will play on your iPod if you start falling behind your normal pace, or when you hit that massive hill. Now that you’ve got people online, there are also opportunities to sell them other stuff to enhance their running experience.
3. COMMUNITIZE IT: Getting users online has many benefits. Connecting the Nike+ to your iPod means that you’re connected to your community because your iPod gets synced with your computer, and your computer get synced with the internet. Now you can not only look at all your runs and highlight trends, but you can share them with your friends. Of course, your iPhone may be GPS enabled which means that it can track where you run as well. Perhaps you’ll set up a special  route in your city so that you can participate in a marathon that is a continent away in real time. And, fostering communities online is the best way to power future  product development because you’re users are the best source of market research, new ideas, innovations, etc.

Now there’s another device that may do it even better, it’s called Fitbit. What I like about Fitbit is that it goes beyong running to address the larger implications of this kind of product. In other words, why stop at running? How about walking? How long I was sitting during the day? And, how I slept? Yup, you got that last part right. How I slept. Wearing the device at night while allows it to gather information about how you’ve been sleeping. I wonder if there’s a market for PowerNappingSongs? Fitbit also presents all the infomation it collects in a digestible and intuitive way.

These two examples just go to show that there’s always more roadmap. I remember feeling like the Nike+ absolutely nailed it and that no other product would have a chance to catch up any time soon. And then, Fitbit took a step ahead. I can’t wait to see where they go from here. If you’ve got a product I encourage you to think about these two examples as you look ahead.