A startup experience

I started at Doplace in a very early phase. It was a startup with the business idea to improve and digitalize workshops for bigger companies. The startup was constructed out of four people. Me, the founder, an investor and a sales representative. As a small team in this early phase everyone was more or less involved in everything that was going on.

In the beginning we had to put a lot of focus on the conceptualization of the company and investigate exactly what we wanted to create and build. We knew in what direction we wanted to go, so we started to look for pilot customers and build early prototypes. A discovery we made early on was that our product had to be fun for the user or no one would use it. We tried to achieve this through gamification. Our hope was that the users would use the product willingly throughout their workday. After several different prototypes and user tests we decided to build parts of the product with a digital moderator that guided the users through the workshops. To be able to show and test this feature on our users I created a video prototype with a pre-filmed moderator that guided a crazy 8 workshop forward. Then I animated the different steps of the workshop and a chat between fake users in After Effects. This way it felt like a live session of the workshop and you could get a clear understanding of how the workshops in the app were going to work. This was very well received by our users and our stakeholders.

Take a look at the video prototype