Video is an excellent design tool. Many companies create promo videos or crowdfunding campaigns to sell their products. Launching a new product with a video can be powerful, however there are many reasons for teams to start making videos even earlier. At the innovation teams at TAT and BlackBerry, we often created videos at the very start of design projects. It became a way to align people’s expectations and videos helped us explore ideas and capture the essence of new product ideas before implementation.
We created this video while working on the mobile presentation tool called BlackBerry Express. Marcus had an idea for a mobile tool that quickly could create beautiful presentations. Our early prototypes and a demo at Mobile World Congress showed that the idea had a lot of potential. Still, there were so many different ways in which it could develop. How could we decide what to keep and what to skip?
When creating the first version of an innovative product, there is always a risk of being side-tracked by an abundance of potential features. This exploration video helped us stay focused on the main value of Express: to quickly create beautiful presentations on a mobile device. It became clear to us that many of the additional features we had considered could blur this main message.
We used an exaggerated scenario to make the main point ridiculously clear. A person successfully prepares an important presentation under serious time pressure. Since this could be explained in one minute, we felt that the concept was easy enough to understand. Once Express was released, an abundance of great reviews showed that users appreciated the simplicity and elegance of this new app.