Playbook is a San Francisco-based startup, reinventing the traditional folder and file system with its visual cloud storage platform specifically for designers and other creatives.
They challenged Berkeley Innovation, a student-run, human-centered design consultancy at UC Berkeley, to find the core product value proposition that will resonate with design students and professors.
Our team created design and marketing deliverables that appeal to the target audiences by conducting user research – this included social media post designs and a seminar. The research also gave the Playbook team insight for future marketing to our proposed user segments.
As the research and synthesis lead for this project, I guided the team through the process of running a 14-participant diary study, conducting pre-study interviews, synthesizing our findings, and preparing materials for the workshop.
Playbook is a new way to store and organize folders and files, specifically designed for creatives.
Picture this: you're working on a final deliverable for a client, and the deadline is fast approaching. The clock is ticking, you're about to send them the final version, you're almost there-- wait, which file is the right file?
Final_Final.jpeg?
ACTUAL_Final.jpeg?
...Final_fr_fr.jpeg?
All creatives, especially those dealing in digital mediums, are familiar with this nightmare scenario. This is especially true for design students, who are constantly racing against the clock to turn things in on time. Playbook helps avoid this problem, and our team aimed to highlight this and other helpful features when marketing the product to this demographic.
When pitching the project to our consulting group, the Playbook team challenged us to answer the following questions:
How might we best introduce a new cloud storage tool, Playbook, to design students and professors as a valuable educational resource?
Drawing from our own experiences as design students, we came up with four user segments to address the design challenge. We focused our efforts to addressing these segments' needs.
Student in a formal design program
Non-design student pursuing design career
Student in a design-related campus club
Design class instructor (student-led included)
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I proposed we begin our research with a cognitive walkthrough, outlining the following goals:
To meet above goals, we came up with 11 tasks to execute through the lens of a student or instructor. While executing them, we asked ourselves 4 important questions that gave us insight into potential pain points.
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Putting ourselves in the shoes of a student trying to achieve this goal, we mapped out the possible actions that would be taken to do so in this flow chart, including those that would not lead to the expected outcome.
This allowed us to not only better understand our target audience, but to get much more familiar with the product and its current capabilities.
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To gain insight into students and instructors' daily use of file storage and sharing tools, we decided to run a diary study in two stages...
Interviewing each participant to understand their context.
Having participants reflect on their file-storage and file-sharing activities for 5 days to understand their usage habits, needs, and pain points.
Given the variety of user segments, we conducted interviews with each participant before the study in order to understand their backgrounds and file-storing and sharing contexts.
What kinds of files do you share? When?
What features does the tool have that are specifically helpful for education purposes?
Are there any education-specific features you’d like to see in file-sharing tool(s)?
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In recruiting participants, we made sure to include participants that spanned across our 4 aforementioned user segments, with some overlap.
Our 14 participants underwent a 5-day diary study recording their daily interactions with cloud storage tools.
This study gave us a lot of insight into users' experiences, goals, and pain points with cloud storage and file sharing in classroom settings.
After the study, we affinity-mapped our findings across user segments to identify key insights.
File organization should be efficient and easy, with high customizability. Improved visual organization, solving for clutter, and name search dependency.
Students and instructors run on a tight schedule -- being efficient is important. All features should contribute to streamlining the user’s classroom experience, from upload speeds to features that eliminate repetitive actions. But speed should not compromise quality; explicit reassurance that quality will be preserved is also important.
Students seek a sense of control and security with their file sharing. They need easy management of permission details and clarity in these file sharing permissions.
Capacity for expressive communication is key in design classrooms. Students and instructors want to be able to provide comments and critique freely in many different forms (and file types), unrestricted to simply short, text-based comments to the file overall.
Accessibility anywhere and everywhere is extremely important! Students and instructors need to access their files on-the-go across apps and devices.
Previewing files efficiently is essential to design classroom workflows. Previews should be clear, accurate, uncropped, and easy to zoom into freely.
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Our research led us to an understanding of how to market to our target user segments. Thus, we planned a seminar as a form of marketing to the student segments (3 out of our 4 segments).
After much delibertaion, we decided on the title...
With guidance from Playbook's head of marketing, we iterated over various designs for social media posts to market our seminar.
We designed with the intention of staying true to Playbook’s branding, while using our insights – as students ourselves – into what students like.
At the end of the seminar, we had attendees fill out a survey expressing their first impressions and thoughts after being exposed to Playbook in the seminar.
So, how do attendees see themselves using Playbook in the future?
Attendees indicated seeing Playbook as being a flexible tool for many different uses, including but not limited to: critique moodboards, sharing and hosting portfolios, class-wide project uploads, organizing ideas, new file management style, and workspace for group project.
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I’ve been using Playbook everyday, and have uploaded 85GB of my own photography, illustrator files, doodles, and more. I love how files are visualized... I feel inspired to do more - I don’t think I can use Google Drive again.
– post-seminar interviewee
As my first ever marketing project, this experience taught me a lot about the importance of a core value proposition and the intricacies of branding.
Having this perspective taught me how to design with branding consciously in mind, and to push the brand's identity to communicate accurately with users and audiences.
When we first started brainstorming ideas for marketing materials, we strayed too far from Playbook's branding in our designs. The Playbook team immediately advised us to prioritize the brand first, especially since this was not a brand design project.
I'm thankful for this mistake, as we learned how to prioritize in the future and how to create a harmonious balance between our new ideas and established design guidelines.
Working with the Playbook team and their product was incredibly fun, especially since I became a loyal Playbook user myself. If we had more time, I wish we could have had a UX design and prototyping sprint. Given our research and insights into user pain points, there was a lot of potential for different directions we could go for designing new features or redesigning existing ones.
Hence, I hope to add an individual design piece to this case study using our findings.
