Recording Every Wink + Click
— getting your point across faster with video
— length & type
9 months
Product Design
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Motion Design
— role
Lead Product Designer
— team
1 Product Manager, 1 UX Researcher, 2 Full Stack Engineers, 2 Video Engine Engineers, 1 Product Marketer
— context
Since 2020, the world rapidly embraced new channels of online communication in the absence of in-person encounters. Small and medium business (SMB) users turned to video to communicate internal company announcements, employee training, product demos and marketing, and much more. In these videos, SMBs used a combination of screen and camera recordings with picture-in-picture layouts.
— problem to solve
After running a marketing choice-based conjoint study, SMB users ranked recording tools as the most valuable feature with high willingness to pay.
SMB users mostly rely on other tools or competitors to create these recordings. The goal was to create a solution so that users could make these recordings directly in Animoto. This effort would serve as the first stepping stone into the company's product strategy to acquire a new target audience, SMB users, to increase product adoption and convert this audience into paying users.
— customer insights
"I have to leave Animoto to record somewhere else and import the asset. Since these are company videos, they need to look professional and polished."
Prospective and current customers resorted to other products with recording functionality to convey their messages. However, they still needed to come to a creative tool like Animoto to edit and place their recordings in a polished format.
Animoto's easy-to-use video editing combined with this high user demand set up Animoto to be an industry differentiator by delivering a high-value proposition where users could both create and edit recordings into a professional-looking video.
How might we empower users to get their point across with video?
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As an Animoto user, I want to record myself and/or my screen.
Get your point across with screen and camera recordings
— concept
Screen and camera recordings allow users to speak directly to their audience and show them what they need to know. Users could create a stand-alone screen or camera-only recording as well as a simultaneous recording of a screen and camera together.
This project condensed a dense set of new functionalities so we packaged it into 4 digestible release milestones. The first iteration released on July 2022 with the final milestone launching on January 2023.
In Detail
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Demo Video
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Concept Development
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— process
To deliver a valuable screen and camera recording experience, the solution needed to account for a holistic consideration of the before, during, and after stages of recording:
Before: empower users to achieve the smoothest and most effective recording setup and preparation possible
During: create an in-recording flow that is straightforward, accessible, and customizable
After: guide users to locate, edit, and share the recording they desire
With these themes, we crafted a suite of concepts to test with an audience of 5-6 SMBs that focused on recording, editing and saving:
- Where do users expect to start a recording? (e.g. inside a block vs. from the tab vs. from a library/sidebar)
- How do users expect to edit their recordings? (e.g. trimming, splitting, drag/moving)
- Where do users expect their recordings will be saved? (e.g. in a
new block vs. in the media asset tray)?
— learnings + outcomes
The concept research findings informed the design must-haves for the MVP by learning which types of functionalities were most valuable for SMB users. Users were looking for the recording stages to be explicitly clear with visual indicators of start and in progress. Losing their work was of utmost concern to users as they expected tight flows for saving and recovering. Lastly, users were looking for editing capabilities to their recordings that surfaced earlier at the recording review stage.
After crafting the user experience, we quickly learned building a recording functionality would not be easy in the video engine. We had to break the project into biteable release chunks:
- 1st milestone: release screen-only recordings, July 2022
- 2nd milestone: allow multiple videos in one video block, review before saving and make uploads 10x faster, October 2022
- 3rd milestone: release camera-only recordings, December 2022
- 4th milestone: launch capability to record screen and camera simultaneously and 4 new picture-in-picture video block layouts, January 2023
We saw a 25% increase in video finalization rates as well as a 25% increase in users making recordings in the first quarter of 2023. The screen and camera recording upsell experience became the highest AOV for professional subscription plans in Animoto yielding over $22.2K in revenue from the marketing campaign.
— improvements
After releasing the first batch of milestones, the team promptly iterated to provide behind-the-scenes support for our customers for higher-quality audio ducking settings and improved upload speed to reduce long user wait times.
Providing the recording functionality was the first step in the journey of positioning Animoto as a valuable offering for small business users. The next iterations and improvements would focus on getting users to create a video faster from scratch with just a recording, advanced editing functionality such as speed control and movable layouts, and more to optimize their creation and editing flows.
— Given the nature of this project, further insights, research sources and design process can only be revealed in an interview setting.
