OVERVIEW
Adobe was interested in broadening their tools, with a particular interest in teaching and incorporating storytelling principles in their products. Adobe chose to work with Berkeley Innovation (human-centered design consulting club @ UC Berkeley), and my team was selected to solve their problem. I had the opportunity to work as a product design consultant with lead designers, Sam Anderson and Sarah Shen, to design products for the Adobe ecosystem that illuminate storytelling in an individual’s creative process.
As a product design consultant, I was equally involved in every step of the design process: UX Research, Interviewing, Synthesizing, Ideation, etc.
As the prototyping sprint lead, I lead the team through our prototyping process. My main priority for the sprint was finalizing our low-fidelity concepts to 3 established high-fidelity products (we went from 7 low-fidelity concepts to 2 high-fidelity + 1 mid-fidelity prototypes). This was accomplished by having my team concept + usability test our ideas, iterate our mockups based on feedback, and ensure that our final products were truly solving Adobe's problem and aligned with our research findings.
Adobe is a company that bridges the gap between art and technology, they aim to change the world through digital experiences. Adobe provides a plethora of resources to aide creators in their process, revolutionizing digital art and making it better than ever.
How might we teach storytelling to Gen-Z content creators?
Before we jump into the process, what were our final deliverables for Adobe?
Story Analyzer: AI outputs an analysis of key story elements, structure, and editing styles from videos that incorporate storytelling.
Problem: Gen-Z creatives don’t realize or value storytelling in their work.
Key insights from research:
• Storytelling is undervalued.
• Storytelling structure & principles are best learned from examples.
Story Planner: A platform that guides new storytellers in their planning process through self-reflective prompts and providing storytelling structure.
Problem: Gen-Z content creators feel stuck planning and recalling necessary details of their stories.
Key insights from research:
•Self-reflection & personal connection are important for brainstorming stories.
•Storytelling structure & principles are best learned from examples.
Envision: Search clips from databases (Netflix, Tiktok, Youtube, etc) as inspiration to the feelings you’d like to emulate in your story. See how different editing styles, visuals, sounds, would fit into your story.
Problem: Gen-Z creators struggle with the ideation phase of storytelling and expressing the emotion they’d like convey to their audience.
Key insights from research:
• Creators struggle in the beginning phases of storytelling.
• Creators value other’s work for inspiration.
• Accurately portraying emotions is crucial to a good story.
What did College Video Creators say?
• Storytelling is learned through continuous practice, not conceptually
• Difficult to find right help and resources for their videos.
• Inspiration primarily from other video creators.
• Motivated by audiences, striving to extract the right reactions and emotions.
What did Expert Storytellers say?
Creative Development Executive @ Pixar
• Learn storytelling by always absorbing new stories.
• Inspired by personal experiences and prompts to overcome writer's block.
Associate Director & Creative Producer @ Bay Area Video Coalition
• Prioritizes teaching storytelling first.
• Video classes emphasize community building and personal questions.
We gathered all our insights from our research and had several affinity maps of insights. Here's our compiled affinity map board with all our main topics, key points, and quotes.
We pulled out the main points from all our research, here's what we found:
At this point, we had learned a lot about the beauty of storytelling. Not everyone can be a natural at storytelling. It takes practice. It can be an intricate and elaborate process.
• Telling our own stories helped us understand what it feels like to be a storyteller.
• Leading questions help in remembering details + memories.
• Portraying and expressing emotions is impactful.
• Cater your story to your audience type.
• Recognize and take advantage of the effects editing has on your story.
• Understanding the importance of storytelling and its structure.
Our final solutions: Story Analyzer, Story Planner, and Envision- fulfill the need of community, inspiration, and story structure. These products are aimed to aide creators in the beginning stages of their process (but can be useful for creative blocks as well) and tackle the pain points creators face in their creative process.
Story Analyzer: AI outputs an analysis of key story elements, structure, and editing styles from videos that incorporate storytelling.
Problem: Gen-Z creatives don’t realize or value storytelling in their work.
Key insights from research:
• Storytelling is undervalued
• Storytelling structure & principles are best learned from examples
Story Planner: A platform that guides new storytellers in their planning process through self-reflective prompts and providing storytelling structure.
Problem: Gen-Z content creators feel stuck planning and recalling necessary details of their stories.
Key insights from research:
•Self-reflection & personal connection for brainstorming stories.
•Storytelling structure & principles are best learned from examples.
Envision: Search clips from databases (Netflix, Tiktok, Youtube, etc) as inspiration to the feelings you’d like to emulate in your story. See how different editing styles, visuals, sounds, would fit into your story.
Problem: Gen-Z creators struggle with the ideation phase of storytelling and expressing the emotion they’d like convey to their audience.
Key insights from research:
• Creators struggle in the beginning phases of storytelling.
• Creators value other’s work for inspiration.
• Accurately portraying emotions is crucial to a good story.
*Certain parts of our process have been omitted to show only the most important aspects of the project.
A special thank you to the Adobe design team and specifically our clients Sam and Sarah for being such wonderful individuals and supporting us along the way!
Thanks for making it this far! This was such an amazing project and I learned so much. I’m so proud of my team for all the great work that we accomplished in 7 months.
Takeaways ✨
→ Narrowing down the problem scope is crucial. Adobe gave us a broad problem scope to start with because they wanted us to have the freedom to interpret however we'd like. We didn't realize how important it was to narrow down our approach to the problem before diving in (ex. who did we want our target audience to be?).
→ The importance of asking questions, clarifying with clients, and constant communication amongst team. Asking questions with your clients + team is extremely valuable. We had stayed in the box when ideating for solutions because we didn't know we could venture further outside the box (until our client clarified with us that we can)! Our constant messaging, updates, and transparency is what made our work so genuine.
→ Storytelling is a beautiful, life-long, underrated skill. This project was really inspiring for me as I have been wanting to explore being a creator (content) myself and I had never thought of the concept of storytelling.
