Project Overview
Kwickie puts you face-to-face with your friends, fans and hard-to-reach celebrities in an innovative video messaging app.
Simply record a short video message and send it to your favourite people. Once they’ve responded, your ‘Kwickie’ is ready to be shared with the world.
The real magic of a Kwickie is that it looks like real time, by recording a user’s reaction to each message.
Whether it’s a fan and their idol, or two friends having a laugh, kwickie’s unique video technology creates a personal interaction between two people which has never been seen before.
Organisation
Team
The project was completely delivered with a small team of passionate professionals here in Australia.
Project Brief
The Kwickie app aims to:
• Delight fans with a money-can't-buy experience
• Empower influencers to conveniently engage with fans
• Help brands to maximise social reach of ambassadors
Our brief was to find a way to connect fans with celebrities, and for this interaction to be sponsored by brands. Sounds simple right? In a saturated market of social messaging applications, social networks and innovations, creating a genuinely unique application to fulfill this brief was not an easy task. At the core of the idea was the simple need to connect fans and their idols. We committed to making this experience as exciting, human and simple as possible.
Kwickie provides real human interaction between users through a video messaging system that is asynchronous. This patented technology allows users to send messages and receive completed responses that capture a live reaction. Messages and responses are rendered together to create what we call a Kwickie. The result looks and feels like a face to face, real time conversation - without the constraints of live video messaging.
From a commercial perspective, it was also important for Kwickie to be innovative in a marketplace full of banner ads and interstitials. We needed to create a product that delivered content in a format that is valuable to the consumer, the brand and the ambassador.
Project Need
For a fan, connecting with an idol or celebrity is an experience that will be cherished for a lifetime. Yet this level of intimacy is almost impossible to establish via traditional social media channels.
Kwickie takes this personal connection to a whole new level by literally putting fans face-to-face with their idols. We take two asynchronous videos and stitch them together to create a “Kwickie” - two users interacting together in a seemingly synchronous product that can then be shared back on Social Networks. This is our core innovation.
In creating this ecosystem of intimate connections, we have also given brands a unique way to interact with the fans of their ambassadors by putting their fan in a commercial with the ambassador. This creates a much more engaging collateral output than traditional advertising which is limited in it’s targeted reach. Not surprisingly we're seeing much higher click through rates on Kwickies than traditional mobile ads. This is our second innovative difference, something that has been coined ‘User Generated Advertising’ (UGA).
User Experience
Our target users are already active on Social Networks and familiar with existing video, or photo, apps. The important user experience challenge for Kwickie was to combine the user’s prior expectations in these areas and introduce to it our unique live video messaging simulation without creating overly complicated or confusing design patterns.
To this end, our team used the lean UX and startup principles to iterate multiple times on how the user should interact with the app while recording a Kwickie. Our goal was to create a seamless and fun user experience while retaining intimacy in the final kwickie video. We did this using usability test groups to rapidly iterate on our UX design. Some of the iterations we performed were on variables such as the camera’s location relative to the user’s eyes, the orientation of the camera and optimising the audio pipeline to enable an audible conversation in changing environments.
Experimenting with the optimum duration of both recordings was also key to ensuring the final kwickie videos were bite-sized and engaging to consume.
While our core value proposition focuses on connecting users with influencers, we have since discovered the user demand for Kwickie as a communication tool between peers. This is perhaps the most exciting learning to come from our lean development approach.
Project Marketing
"Chris Gayle had a kwickie with you!” WTF? OMG!!
Imagine the feeling when you receive a Kwickie. Whether it’s fun, entertaining or informative, a Kwickie, particularly from an influencer, begs to be shared with the world. We’ve incorporated this core desire directly into our user acquisition and retention strategies.
Our marketing strategy relies on the idea that great kwickie content is the best form of advertising. Currently our user acquisition is achieved through this organic social reach with minimal paid advertising. The more kwickies created and shared, the faster our user-base is growing. We have deliberately opened the viewing of content to the world (you don’t need the App) but in order to send or receive a Kwickie, you’ll need to install and register.
The commercialisation of our app has been a key part of the innovation journey. Brands, our clients, not only benefit from our unique ‘User Generated Advertising’ model but also the use of our platform as a content creation tool. For brands, Kwickie delivers an easy to use and cost-effective social marketing solution. Brands can control, moderate and share all video content through our Brand Management Web Platform.
Project Privacy
Kwickie works with secure data networks protected by both industry-standard firewalls and by strong passwords. We use security measures in order to safeguard members’ identifying details. These measures include but are not limited to token based authorisation levels for all forward facing data access, obfuscation of identifiers during user data transmission, we employ a “only send if required” policy that prevents transmission of data if it is not absolutely needed, and we work to protect the security of information during transmission by using secure sockets layer (SSL) software to encrypt information.
User passwords are encrypted with industry-standard algorithms and stored safely behind our firewall system. These passwords are never stored or used by client applications but are instead converted to an anonymised and time constrained access token. In the event of a security breach being detected, all access tokens can be reset.
In addition to privacy protection policies, Kwickie is currently engaging in further penetration testing and data integrity measures to ensure all customer data is protected.
Digital - New Service or Application
This can be any new service or application from a start-up to an industry leader. It’s not just bells and whistles we're after but true innovation, exceeding expectations and filling a void that had previously been open.
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