Berkeley Innovation x Adobe
Storytooling
Team
Neel Saswade, Kamille Dyan Fernando, Megan Chai, Amal Alyousfi
Role
Product Design Consultant, Ideation generation and validation lead
Timeline
September 2021 - January 2022
Tools & Skills
Product Design, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Figma
OVERVIEW
This project focused on designing multiple hi-fidelity solutions to creatively teach storytelling within the Adobe ecosystem. This was a joint collaboration between our clients, Adobe, and Berkeley Innovation.
I was a product design consultant on a team of four, and I lead the team through the idea generation and validation phase. I also designed one of the solutions.
Following is a bit of research, a lot of prototyping, and a ton of storytelling.
CHAPTER 1
SETTING THE SCENE
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Adobe’s Creative Cloud ecosystem does not help creators write better stories. Our clients approached us because they felt as if Adobe’s creative tools do a great job of creating content, but fall short when it comes to teaching storytelling. Storytelling is a superpower, and they wanted to help creatives harness it.
With our access to college students in Berkeley, we scoped the project to the following prompt:
How might we teach storytelling to Gen Z video creators?
SNEAK PEEK OF THE FINAL SOLUTION
We developed two high-fidelity solutions to target the three central components of storytelling: community, structure, and inspiration.
Story Analyzer takes the URL of any video, and an A.I. outputs an analysis of key story elements, structure, and editing styles.
Aspiring storytellers learn what key story elements make videos that creators already watch so successful and engaging for viewers, and learn to value the power of storytelling.
Story Analyzer
Storyplanner is a whiteboarding platform with smartly generated “prompts” that help spark ideas that would not have necessarily appeared on their own.
Prompts also question whether a storyteller is following the basic elements of a story for a given genre.
Storytellers can add visual inspiration in a video clip search engine making the central destination for planning their next video.
Story Planner
Designing Story Planner was one of my main focuses for this project
How did we get here? Let’s dive into our own story
CHAPTER 2
UNDERSTANDING STORYTELLING
SPEAKING WITH STORYTELLERS
We conducted interviews on both Gen-Z and expert storytellers to explore how they approach storytelling in the content they produce and what it means to them.
Interviews with Gen-Z
Our Gen-Z storytellers had a variety of backgrounds and niches. We were interested in understanding how Gen-Z views storytelling and what their process of content creation consists of. We found that storytelling is undervalued, the variety of stories that can be told, and more.
Interviews with Expert storytellers
Our expert storytellers provided us with a deeper insight into what storytelling really is, as well as what happens “behind the scenes” in the brainstorming process. We learned that achieving “good” storytelling requires planning, personal connection, and more.
GROUPING STORYTELLING CONCEPTS
After user research, we grouped our findings into an affinity map to reveal common themes surrounding video creation and storytelling.
WHO ARE WE DESIGNING FOR?
To pinpoint user patterns and better empathize with our user groups, we created four user personas for college video creators to identify their different motivations and needs. The four personas are the novice, the expert, the visionary, and. the emulator
The Emulator
The emulator understands tools & video editing, but can’t formulate stories well. They try to emulate their favorite Youtubers but rarely find success.
Pain Points: Lacking an understanding of the importance of story structure while also struggling in finding inspiration and examples for stories
Emotions: Emulators frequently feel frustrated by being stuck from creative block
Goals: To become a unique and profound storyteller, rather than just copying the style of others
KEY INSIGHTS
Our research informed us of three key insights. We noticed patterns within teaching story structure, self-reflection and connection, and how undervalued storytelling is among Gen-Z content creators.
CHAPTER 3
GENERATING STORYTELLING CONCEPTS
IDENTIFIED OPPORTUNITY SPACES
Our key insights informed us of three main opportunity spaces involving storytelling community, inspiration, and story structure. We identified these areas as the most impactful and necessary for good storytelling and wanted to ideate solutions in these product spaces.
IDEA GENERATION
As sprint leader, I helped guide the team through concept generation and selection.
Leveraging our insights and synthesis, we used the “How might we statements”, and ideated a wide range of solutions: digital, physical, and spatial.
In this phase, we challenged ourselves to understand what it really means to tell a story and to reach the core of a storyteller — to get real with vulnerability.
INITIAL CONCEPTS
We sketched and create low-fidelity prototypes for each cateogry of our “How Might We” statements. Some notable ideas include BehanceU: a safe space for students to share work and recieve constructive criticism, Interactive Story Room: a pop-up space to educate students about storytelling, Story Prompts: a story-card game that helps with writer’s block, and many more ideas.
To select final concepts, we assessed how much the team and clients resonated with each idea. We performed concept testing, and analyzed the impact, feasibility, and research support to land on two final concepts.
CHAPTER 4
OUR STORYTELLING SOLUTIONS
Our final solutions, Story Analyzer and Story Planner, address storytelling for students. We created two high-fidelity products, and a mid-fidelity product (not shown) that each address different pain points video creators experience and insights we gathered. Explained below are our high fidelity prototypes.
STORY ANALYZER
A video analyzing system, generated by artificial intelligence (AI), that outputs key story elements, editing styles, & more
The Problem: Gen-Z social creators don’t realize or value storytelling in their work.
The Solution: Using popular, successful videos as an example, demonstrate how one can learn from the video’s story elements by illustrating the structure and elements.
Step 1 Input the URL of a video
Learn from examples
Learn what key story elements make videos that creators already watch so successful and engaging for viewers.
Step 2: An A.I. outputs an analysis of key story elements, structure, and editing styles
Demonstrating what makes a story successful
Summary of how the story is presented in the video and identifying its key elements
Teaching story structure
Break down the video’s timeline into parts and analyze how structure guides the story
Step 3 Save the video to
reference for later
Referencing analysis when creating videos
Save analyzed videos to reference for later on in the video creation process to apply new storytelling skills and elements
Concept 2
STORY PLANNER
A platform that guides content creators in the brainstorming stage with an array of prompts related to their video topic and content
The Problem
Content creators can feel stuck planning and fleshing stories when they already have ideas
The Solution
A platform that efficiently guides new storytellers in their planning process through visual inspiration and self reflection.
I worked on conceptualizing Story Planner and designing its user experience and interface.
How to use Story Planner
Select a genre/topic-specific template or blank canvas
Create and map major story elements
Flesh out each element by dragging notes, prompts, or clips to the element
Research Support for Core Features
Prompts - Uncovering extraordinary ideas
Prompts are questions that help spark ideas that would not have necessarily appeared on their own
Self Reflection
By using prompts, we can help storytellers uncover relevant experiences within themselves
Teaching Storytelling Strucuture
Prompts can question whether a storyteller is following the basic elements of a story for a given genre (e.g., pacing in humor)
Clips - Finding content inspiration
Clips help storytellers find the type visual content they want to see in their video
Content Inspiration
Creators like to emulate their favorite content creators in their own videos.
A focus on fast
Creators prefer not to spend hours combing through videos for inspiration. The advanced search in clips makes this task fast.
Iterations from Usability Testing
By conducting one round of concept testing and usability testing, I was able improve the user experience to focus more on the needs of emulating storytellers. The redesigns focused on designing a speedier experience, and ensuring all of one’s creative needs were met.
Iteration 1 (top row to bottom left): Removed modals as they felt disruptive to creative flow. Replaced modals with a sliding drawer and focused on draggable interactions. Dragging items felt natural, and contributed to the fast experience associated with whiteboarding.
Iteration 2 (bottom left to bottom right): Adapted visual design to Adobe’s Design System. Added visual inspiration in the form of cliips as a testing participant mentioned they wanted to map out their videos visually here as well. Since audio and text elements already occupied the right side of each story branch, visual clips comfortably fit in on the left side.
CHAPTER 5
EPILOGUE
REFLECTING BACK
Wishes
With more time, we would have liked to perform usability testing to further ensure both concepts elicit the proper functionality from our target users
Takeaways
Narrowing down on a singular user group first and foremost requires strong research justification
Selecting final solutions in a broad problem scope can be challenging, but at the end of the day, we must analyze what serves the user best
Storytelling is super relevant in everyday life!
Thanks
Huge thank you to Sam and Sarah at Adobe who mentored us through the whole semester! Our team gained valuable experiences that last us a lifetime.
