ZURB’s design process begins with defining the problem and understanding organizational needs. This includes aspects such as the organization’s business needs, mission, culture, and target clients. Through defining the challenge, insights arise. These insights are pushed forward to explore opportunities. This exploration begins with sketching, and structure becomes more clear through wireframes and prototyping.
The Social team went through this process, starting with an audit exploring different facets of homelessness and looking to define how Downtown Streets Team can use social media to grow its impact. The team examined how Downtown Streets Team might increase traffic to their site through Facebook and Twitter. The team identified that the concept See, Fight, Change can be applied to different videos for social media. The social team is exploring these different concepts in a series of small videos. Exploration of these videos began with sketches:
Through these sketches, the team was able to quickly put a large amount of ideas up for discussion and quickly gain feedback. It’s through this mixture of visual representation of ideas and conversation, that teams can quickly move from insight to opportunity. For us today during ZURB Wired, this involves several rounds of sketches to move the best ideas forward into prototyping where there are also several rounds of iteration.
As the team developed a stronger understanding of the concepts to translate into clear messages within video clips, they began putting together storyboard sketches. Whereas sketching was about discovering insights, storyboarding was about bringing those insights forward into several executions of unified messages. The team explored several storyboards for the social videos. The videos are being designed to be used on social channels with different promotional campaigns, with a focus of engaging users with simple calls to action to donate to Downtown Streets Team or to get involved in their cause.
The purpose of storyboarding at this stage is high-level exploration of storytelling themes. The Social Team’s exploration of five social campaign concepts is summarized with a brief synopsis.
After the social team determined the basic messaging strategy behind these five campaigns, they began iterating on tactics to use within social media assets to funnel people into Downtown Street Team’s donation pages. The tactics explored are templates for Facebook and Twitter involving both video and still images, as well as workflows.
(We'd like to thank G-Technology for generously donating an awesome Thunderbolt drive that's speeding up our video editing!)