Storytelling with Demo Videos (2015)
Telling the user’s story is a powerful way of communicating product impact. For the IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack 4.3 release, I coordinated the crowdsourced production of assets that would be used for customer feedback and education. For each sprint and for the product release, development teams in the US and China made playback videos with some assistance from the design team. The playbacks were centered around personas, which helped to solidify team members’ understanding of the product in real world usage.
Contributions: Personas, storytelling, video production, education, documentation
Personas
The playback videos told the story of the two personas, Michael (the cloud administrator) and Maureen (a developer). Each video starts by introducing the personas.
A slide then introduced the story.
Then after some technical background about the update, the intro recaps specifically how each persona will benefit.
Demos
The personas told their own stories with speech balloons, superimposed over the video recording of the demo. We used speech balloons instead of audio to avoid the additional challenge of adding voice narration.
The playbacks show their apprehensions and hopes for the product. Michael was excited about quotas.
Because the new release introduced a new UI, one of Maureen's themes was transitioning to the new UI.
At the end both personas shared their feedback about the updates.
Templates and Best Practices
In order to empower developers to produce videos with a consistent look and feel and a focus on the personas, my UX Team created a template for the presentation and videos, and video-production how-to videos. My team and I also provided video assistance as needed.
Outcomes
A team of 20 contributors created about 20 videos by following the template my team created. They learned to see the impact their work would have on real users. This was a fantastic way to keep developers focused on users. It also avoided the inevitable technical problems that occur with demos.
The playback videos were shared with internal stakeholders, customers and sales teams. They were also a fantastic first step at bringing Design Thinking to our development team.
"...thank you for the great set of playbacks that were shown today! The quality and consumability of the content was terrific, and it was all shared in a way that shows the value our product can bring to a client!...Many thanks to Jeff for setting the direction for the playback framework, helping to ensure consistency and quality of the content/video, and for orchestrating this playback! Great job by all...... Can't wait for the next batch of playbacks! :)"
-IBM Cloud Solutions & OpenStack Development Program Manager