Translating Your Unique Value Proposition Into a Unique User Experience
How young companies can follow their mission to divine the right UX for their audiences.
Facebook became Facebook when the Newsfeed launched. Sure, it had meteoric adoption before. And, sure, other sites had pioneered the idea of a feed. But, the premise of the Newsfeed was based on a simple consumer insight: People like when things are in the same place.
Previous to the Newsfeed, people on Facebook bounced around different people’s profiles to see the latest about their friends. Today, by aggregating all that information, the News Feed encapsulates Facebook’s mission: to bring the world closer together by quite literally bringing your world closer together in a series of posts on a long-scrolling page. It’s an example of a brand’s user experience — its interface and its features — supporting its value proposition.
At R/GA Ventures, we help companies identify and build their News Feed: the core concept or element that gets at the core of what a product was built to do.
Experience design can be a tricky thing for young teams. Startups grow in fits and starts, responding to founders’ passions, funders’ pocketbooks, and clients’ needs. For many companies in the early stages, UX often takes a backseat to things like building out a sales pipeline and hiring a team. So it’s not unusual for a company to enter one of our programs having never addressed their experience design, or considered the ways in which their unique offering translates into a unique experience.
That’s why we start at the beginning: working with founders to understand who their product is for, why they created it, what it does, and how it works. Once we know these things, we’re ready to think about building the right experience.
Relative Insight
Relative Insight is a comparative language analysis platform. It helps brands identify the differences in how people speak, and use those insights to create authentic campaigns that resonate with different audiences. When they came to R/GA Ventures as part of our Marketing Tech Venture Studio with Snap, Inc, they had an amazing piece of technology that their long-time users loved. But the tool, originally built by academics in the UK, wasn’t easy to use, and new clients struggled to know where to start.
The problem? Relative Insight works by identifying two audience groups, or data sets, and comparing them to identify meaningful words, phrases and grammar. But the UX wasn’t supporting this value proposition. It didn’t make it easy for people to start a comparison — the word “compare” didn’t even appear on the platform. As a result, Relative had a difficult time selling the product as a SaaS solution to brands and agencies, and spent too much time onboarding users.
The solution was a simple sentence that literally visualized this idea of comparison.
The sentence highlights what the user is comparing, and the nature of that comparison, while allowing her to shift focus between semantics and grammar with a dropdown. It’s a single consistent element that guides people through every step of the process, from adding a data source to sharing the results. And most importantly, it’s user friendly: so the tool, which was once only accessible to analysts and data science teams, can now be used by marketers and creatives.
Quickframe
Quickframe, also a part of our Marketing Tech Venture Studio with Snap, Inc, offered a different challenge. A platform that connects clients with video editors called “creators” to create short-form content for social, it’s a new type of video production: one focused on volume, efficiency, and affordability. It’s a solution for brands who demand new videos for their channels daily, but are bogged down by traditional production methods (and endless back-and-forth approval processes).
Yet Quickframe’s initial platform didn’t do enough to support their value proposition, and anecdotally, they were seeing customer drop-off thanks to a daunting onboarding process. If they were trying to reimagine video production, why shouldn’t the brief — the very first part of the process — be reimagined as well? The new experience became the QuickBrief.
The QuickBrief started by reducing the traditional client brief to its most essential parts. Our ambition: to make the process of briefing creator as easy as getting a car on Uber. We began by cataloging every step of the traditional video production process, working with the R/GA Content Studio. Then we extracted the six most important inputs: the title, the audience , length of video, video type (ie. cinemagraph vs GIF vs how-to), the output and the objective . We wanted it to be just enough to get a client excited and get a creator going (oh — and also make onboarding a breeze).
Now brands that use QuickFrame can easily articulate what they’re looking for: a benefit that not only saves them time at the beginning, but reduces the amount of back-and-forth with editors.
VidRovr
VidRovr came into our Verizon MediaTech program as a young company with incredible technology. They offer a powerful new way to search video: one that redefines how we think about searching, what we look for, and the results we get in return. Instead of searching for a video, like you might on Google, users can search for clips within videos. The platform utilizes computer vision and machine learning to serve up results: a tool that the founders built while getting their PhD’s at Columbia.
Despite a strong value proposition, however, Vidrovr’s initial search platform looked and felt like a traditional search engine. The experience didn’t make clear to users that they were searching for segments within full videos, and the search criteria wasn’t clearly defined. So we worked with them to redesign their platform, emphasizing the clip throughout the user experience.
Our mission was to help users distinguish between a full clip (ie. a result you’d get using traditional video search) and a specific clip that matches a specific set of criteria. We also wanted to help them define what they were looking for: whether it be a person, a place or a particular event.
Now, Vidrovr’s experience supports its mission: redefining what video discovery looks like for a new generation.
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The best user experience is the one that the customer never thinks about. The purpose and the functionality is understood immediately and implicitly. However, what’s transparent to a customer requires real concerted work from a business. By examining the real value a business brings — the difference it brings to its customers’ lives — it’s possible to design experiences that maximize what brands can deliver to their audience.
