My "Pre-viz" work
What the heck is pre-viz, you ask? Think, pre-visualization. Showing the thing before the thing actually exists. When setting out to create something new—especially an interactive feature or product, the best way to start is with inexpensive, "throw-away" materials. One of my superpowers is bringing ideas and concepts to life via sketches, storyboards and animated prototypes/mockups.
Below, you'll find a few highlights from recent previz work I've done as part of my recent consulting work with startups.
CASE STUDY: The "Magic Doodles" feature
Skylight is a company that makes one of the most popular wifi-connected photo frames in millions of homes across the world. The "Frame" is a #1 seller on Amazon, and is typically purchased as a gift to elderly loved ones who are less technically savvy. The frame is easy to set up, but the real magic is the way family members around the world can easily send photos and videos via the Skylight mobile app to their loved one's frame. It is truly a magical thing.
As part of my consulting work for Skylight, I came up with the idea for a feature that would serve two important goals.
- Increase customer engagement, measured by increasing the average number of memories shared to photo frames by loved ones.
- Introduce new features to make the annual subscription more desirable, thus increasing the attach rate.
After a week of customer interviews, a number of concepts were generated based on the insights from the conversations. "Magic Doodles" was the favorite among the Skylight executives and product leads. To ensure Magic Doodles was a feature customers would love—and ultimately achieve the goals—I created previz materials to put in front of customers to measure their interest.
Magic Doodles
Magic Doodles is a unique feature that will include children in the process of sharing things to grandma & grandpa's Skylight Frame. the idea is simple, but the effect is magical. 🪄
- Inside the Skylight mobile app, offer a canvas with basic drawing and shape tools
- People can create fun drawings
- These drawings can be sent to their loved one's photo frame
- ✨ MAGIC ✨ - when grandma and grandpa see the Doodle on their photo frame, it's not just a still image. The pen and brush strokes come to life, reanimated as if their grandchild was drawing in real-time. In fact, in post-launch feedback, some customers said they got a call from the grandparents saying "I'm watching them draw now, this is incredible!"
Rough sketches
Here is the initial set of sketches I created to start the conversation internally with both designers and engineers, as well as to show to a handful of customers I had spoken with during the research stage. We saw multiple eyebrow raises, and received enough 9/10 out of 10 ratings on the concept. The team and I were convinced we had something compelling that would include children in the household.
Animated prototypes & mockups
Here is an animated mockup I created in Adobe AfterEffects showing in high-fidelity how the experience could manifest in the real world, showing the doodling experience within the Skylight mobile app, and what the re-animated Doodle will look like when playing back on the Photo Frame. I've found that these inexpensive, relatively quick to create materials are a triple win. First, they're essential for validating concepts before committing expensive resources, and second, they become a rich way of communicating the product vision to the team that will be building it. And third, they are easily reused by the marketing team to market the feature, both in-app as well as out on socialz! This is exactly what happed at Skylight, the marketing team saw these videos and immediately Slacked me asking if they can use them for social ads they were planning. 🏆
CASE STUDY: Inspirational Quotes
Another previz for a feature for the Skylight Photo Frame. This one came out of insights gleaned from speaking with customers, as well as observing how both my mother and my mother-in-law were using the frames I sent them. (Whenever I work on a product, my family and friends become my guinea pigs to help build up first hand experience with the product).
I noticed that they were taking screenshots of quotes they came across on FB and Instagram, and then sending them to their photo frames. But the images included all of the UI junk from the app it was taken from. It got me thinking, "what if we offered a library of inspirational quotes that were beautifully animated, that can be incorporated in the photo slideshow of their family photos?".
Here is an animated mockup of what the experience could be like, seeing the quotes interspersed with family photos.
CASE STUDY: StandUpper: Imagining a better way to run daily standups in Slack
I don't know about you, but sometime's daily standups with product teams can make ones eyes glaze over. This is a concept for a Slack extension that can help teams run tight standups, in a gamified sort of way. The thinking is, what if you can turn a standup into an immersive, JackBox games-like experience, giving each member of the team their time in the spotlight, with a timer. It can become a fun game to give your standup update before the timer expires and you are cut off.
Here is an animated mockup of what the experience could be like (and yes, I did all the voices for the team haha!)
CASE STUDY: Exploring Atlas Primer's Customer Experience
Atlas Primer is an AI-powered audio-based learning app that converts written and video materials into audio, and enables a learner to build a variety of learning approaches around it, like audio flash-cards, interactive quizzes, as well as being able to interrogate the content to deepen their knowledge.
The storyboards helped the founder/CEO to communicate the power of Atlas Primer to investors, and it also get the engineering team to empathize with the customer, bringing the customer center-stage.
Need help bringing your ideas to life? I'd love to help.
Drop me a note, or schedule a call.
❤️