En Route to C4 Studio
Last time I gave a glimpse of the current state of affairs and how the C4 Studio concept was aiming to be a solution for the world of design production for mobile app development.
As the Logic & Form team discovered, there are some inefficiencies within App development pipelines and animation prototyping. The team also realized it was a perfect opportunity to benefit from its in-house developed framework. This is C4, the creative coding framework created by head programmer: Travis Kirton.
The million-dollar question
How to proceed with the project? Where do you start building such a production tool? An animation/prototyping tool that wants to break the mold should try to understand its desired place in the world. Part of the answer came from figuring out the pain points of our intended users and dissecting the needs of mobile designers. To further understand them our team met with power users and heard different types of potential stakeholders. From then on, we approached the problem as most user-centred design projects do in start-up environments.
Persona analysis, in depth interviews and qualitative data were being harvested. Add to the mix a touch of intuition from our team’s futurists, which helped focus the intended vision for C4 Studio. This reminds us that sometimes companies oversee a key aspect of product ideation; that the good core ideas come typically from inspired individuals.
But it’s also true that structured ideation sessions help to elaborate and enrich concepts brought by these individuals, specially when there’s an agreed problem to solve. Out of the proposed concept popped more ideas, out of research came “the minimal requirements” for such a tool, and also the perceived problems with current production practices. All these designs brought even more ideas for new features. How did we integrate all of them into a usable and coherent solution for an interaction designer?
Our approach
We took our time to plan our ideal mobile production process. Here’s where drawing a detailed user flow and taking care at writing down “epics” helped this design team recognize innovative features for C4Studio. Believe me, we laid down all possible flows that a potential user could go through when interacting with an animation tool of this nature. We used other prototyping software for inspiration and wrote down their own use cases. We analyzed iOS designer requirements. Desired scenarios for mobile design and handoff workflows were imagined. This is called the divergent thinking phase of innovation theory — trying to get as much concepts on paper as possible.
To guide the convergent thinking stage of our ideation (essentially trimming unnecessary ideas) the team revised its priorities:
- The Why / For Whom: The minimal features required in an animation tool by our selected user base.
- The What: Boiling down the concept to match the value proposition for C4Studio.
- The How / The When / The Where: What our design/programming team is able to produce in the allotted timeframe for this project.
- What does success look like for a minimal viable product (MVP) at Alpha?
- What might success look like for Beta?
By the end of this process I can safely say our team had a clear vision for a roadmap to produce the first prototype of C4 Studio. The defined scope and alpha production plan looked very much similar to what our team leaders had envisioned at the beginning of the project. Was it coincidence? Did we have flawless futurists in the team? Convincing product owners? Doesn’t really matter, because we were supporting design decisions with conscientious information and were now aware of the risks. Building our first MVP would allow us to understand the implications of these decisions and test assumptions.
Till next time,
David G.
