Envisioning Animoto’s Collaborative Video Creation Studio For Advanced Creators
ANIMOTO
RESEARCH & STRATEGY
Discovery Research, User Persona, Journey Map, Design Prioritization, MVP Vision & Guidelines
Animoto is a video editing tool that makes it easy to create high-quality videos using a simple drag-and-drop interface. The company leadership wanted to reimagine the experience to help advanced creators create videos all in one place. In this project, I played a key role creating the design strategy and product vision by starting a UX Growth Team. Over three months, our small team led multiple research and design efforts and revitalized the company product roadmap while working with executive stakeholders.
User Problem
Video Creators Are Bootstrapped For Time, Money, and Resources
We started analyzing various types of resources advanced creators had, or didn’t have, access to and how that influenced their perceptions towards video creation. We surveyed 100+ creators in the US and found that in Animoto and competitor users:
80% felt frustrated they weren’t making as many videos
Less than 20% got access to healthy budgets to hire professional crews
75% missed deadlines regularly on more than half of their projects
Discovery Research
Diagnosing Workflow Leaks and Breaking Points for Video Creators
We further conducted 60 minute in-depth interviews with advanced video creators where we asked them to walk us through their creation process in more detail and discuss their workarounds for existing problems, including analog and digital tools.
Interview Clips with Creators
Research Findings
We identified previously unknown pain points with advanced creators. Their biggest problems that we were surprised to learn came down to collaboration issues within their team. Notably, they were were resorting to using either multiple tools or analog methods as workarounds, though still dealing with longer timelines and detriments to their video quality.
Collecting timely feedback: Getting video approval requires persistence, tracking down stakeholders, and feedback loops.
Disorganized communications: Project communication occurs over a diverse range of tools, leading to friction in teams.
Disjointed storage: Assets are captured and stored by various teammates, making them difficult to find over multiple devices.
New Persona — Generating Empathy for Creators
We created a persona to cross-pollinate research insights about advanced creators. We chose to contextualize users video creation behaviors, habits, and motivations around their need to maintain healthy and collaborative relationships at work. This approach combated existing negative internal biases about users lack of proficiency nature such as a lack of desire, interest, and skill.
User Journey— Expanding Ideas of Video Creation
Our team also outlined different stages of advanced creators workflows, from strategizing creative ideas to sharing videos online. Our team chose to visualize the end-to-end process that these advanced users take to create videos rather than narrowly focusing on the video editing phase. From this, we identified gaps in our existing product and analog workarounds that we could translate into new functionalities.
Design Process
Our team met on a regular basis over 2 weeks, brainstorming and sketching concepts that would simplify users video workflows by bringing advanced editing capabilities, feedback collection, and project management features into a single video workspace.
Concepting on Team Miro Boards
Surveying Users to Prioritize Concepts
We tested our 100+ design concepts with advanced creators in a survey and prioritized them based on (1) how likely customers would use a feature and (2) how customers perceived a feature on its effectiveness to simplify their video production workflows overall.
Ranked Survey Responses to Concepts
MVP Guidelines
We created a set of guidelines as part of the greater product vision that outlined essential functionalities of a collaborative video creation studio for advanced creators. We delivered this work to the executive leadership team and product team leads, which was used to reorganize teams and refine roadmaps towards new initiatives that would bring the most value to users.
Categorized By Journey Stage