Lead Designer: Boston Gordon
Cloud based storage solutions for creative content makers to collaborate remotely, share drafts, and capture the creative process.
The Problem
When tasked with creating a unique cloud storage based solution in a crowded market, my solution was to create an interactive creative collaborative product for content-makers to easily track drafts, chat, and collaborate with others.
User Research
I crafted a survey to see where there was space in this crowded field and what were missed opportunities for innovation. According to the results from my survey participants, the number one thing that users like about current cloud based storage tools is the ability to collaborate in real time. Users also value tools that facilitate communication, easily keep them organized, maintain version control, and that they can access from anywhere.
53% of users said they used cloud storage to collaborate with creative partners. That was my target audience - a large swath of the population using cloud based storage to make art and creative content.
Survey results showed that more than half of users collaborate with creative partners using cloud storage.
Competitive Analysis
In order to discover how my product could fit into such a crowded field I compared three large cloud based storage companies: Dropbox, Box, and Degoo.
All three attempt to solve the same problems, but what they lacked was a targeted focus of users and I knew that that was the direction I wanted my product to go in based on my survey results.
Personas
My personas encompassed creative professionals with diverse needs: from a GIS Specialist in need of a project presentation tool, to novelists working on the next draft of their book, to marketing professionals constantly creating content on a team of social media managers. Content Creators would be the product’s bread and butter. This could include writers, journalists, marketing professionals, film and television creators, musicians and more.
User Stories and Flows
My high priority user stories included: Creating and uploading files, editing documents, storyboards, and presentations, sharing files with other users, organizing files via folders, saving different drafts of files, and viewing these drafts in an organized manner.
I charted out and diagramed user flows for each of these user tasks in order to best organize how each task would be accomplished. This helped me visualize the product’s efficiency and map out how users wanted to best move through tasks.
User flows showing how users will share and create files and folders.
Sketches
With my user stories and flows in mind I sketched the app in order to best serve the priorities of my users. I needed to visualize the space between elements and begin to imagine what the full product would look like to my future users.
Lo-fi Prototypes and Testing
I wanted to keep the product clean and neat with lots of white space, space that would make room for the creative projects of the targeted customer base.
I tested basic tasks within the prototype on three users. All three users found some tasks simple to get through and some confusing. My biggest takeaway from the test was that I hadn’t created a clear path for people to organize the content once it has been added.
Low fidelity wireframe of the Fizz sign up page.
Branding
Fizz would represent everything the product would offer: bubbling ideas, and big energy, social collaboration, the art of creation. The brand identity would use bold colors, clean fonts, and lots of white space to invoke these feelings.
Hi-fi Prototype and Testing
First iteration of the Fizz user homepage.
I tested on three users again and found that while I had solved some of the clunkiness of the low-fidelity prototype I was still not landing on the mark.
I revised the design to focus more on the drafting process and added more clean and clear layout to aid users in completing tasks easily and efficiently. I had focused on big bold images instead of the clean design I wanted to facilitate creativity.
The homepage was made lighter and more intuitively organized.
I included the ability to collaborate in real time with pen markups, comments, and suggestions so that creative collaborators could use the tool like a virtual workshop. Users have the option to save draft versions to capture the life cycle of the creative process so creatives can see how they got from their first draft to their polished product.
COnclusion
I feel confident that I succeeded in creating a product that is simple with the right tools to help people collaborate creatively. It is a solid product that can attract a base of creative consumers - just the folks who I was hoping to target. It’s clean, accessible, and has the tools that content creators use everyday to collaborate efficiently.