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Project Overview
We are submitting eva, a revolutionary facing video social network, which aims at becoming the perfect medium for millions of consumers to easily share extraordinary experiences and indescribable moments via video. Eva was created by global service design consultancy, WAE in partnership with Forbidden Technologies. Globally launched worldwide in October 2015, this new social network was developed in just 30 days. Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram have met the global market’s need for text and photographs. With its beauty, simplicity and addictiveness, eva is designed to do the same for video.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
With offices in London and New York, WAE partners with visionary leadership teams who head up companies that will live or die according to the quality of the customer’s experience of the brand. WAE is uniquely qualified – through innovation, insights, design and human behaviour analysis – to answer the question “how do you make game changing improvements to how you sell and deliver your products and services to your customer?” This results in the delivery of products and services so different and so superior that they give clients a clear, sustainable competitive advantage with intelligence and speed.
Unlike big digital factories that are slow, unimaginative and bound by process, and advertising agencies that don’t get the future of customer experience and how people will behave, WAE clients get a very different service. As a result, WAE boasts some of the best known FTSE and Fortune 100 businesses in its portfolio. For more information on WAE please visit www.hellowae.com
Project Brief
As developers of the leading cloud-based video editing solution, Forbidden Technologies had the technology to create innovative video products. The company chose WAE to collaborate with on eva, as it was impressed with WAE’s RaCE (Rapid, agile, Customer, Engagement) methodology and programme, and recognised this would help to transform eva’s experience. WAE had also demonstrated that it could work collaboratively, understanding business needs as well as the technology and consumer landscape.
From the outset, WAE recognised that a traditional design-led approach would not achieve the desired results. The team decided to set up a war room on Forbidden’s premises and created a lean start-up environment. This gave WAE a fertile setting to challenge all aspects of the design, ranging from brand to market positioning to interface design. All ideas and feedback were simultaneously being fed into the branding process.
Research into the consumer’s viewpoint took a central role in WAE’s work. WAE ran a unique and iterative process, utilising accelerated lean UX principles to enable the team to design in a day, creating designs in the morning, testing the new concepts in the afternoon with consumers on the streets, and repeating these tests until they got it right. Using its RaCE programme, WAE combined over 200 contextual interviews with collaborative discovery, and designed the ideal consumer service for a range of audiences.
This approach allowed the team to focus on each step and interaction, quickly moving forwards with the successful ideas and eliminating the poor ones on a day-by-day basis.
Project Need
WAE came up with a total of 1,000 ideas which were all put through a vigorous process of test and learn, and the result of this design process is that eva offers a beautiful experience which allows people to express themselves through video. It is this attention to user experience that makes eva so innovative. Of WAE’s extensive catalogue of ideas for the final product, 220 designs were developed and tested with more than 400 people globally, before seven end-to-end prototypes were evolved into a final version for alpha trails. Throughout this process, the research team at WAE never anchored an idea until consumers confirmed that they wanted that feature, resulting in a social media platform that was completely user-approved throughout the entirety of its development.
eva brings to the table a new and unique social media experience, whereby the user shares their experiences with friends through video, as opposed to written “posts” or images. Other platforms have restrictions on the length or quality of videos posted, but by prioritising video, eva provides the best available video experience on social media. This is an unparalleled way to share or immerse yourself in an experience, giving users the ability to easily go one step further than trying to describe an incredible moment with text, or capture its entirety in a single image. If a picture says a thousand words, how much does a video say?
User Experience
WAE engaged the users from day one of the project, taking numerous prototype designs of eva onto the streets to hear what users wanted from the final product. As a result of this, engaging with the app and the process of recording, sharing and viewing videos is beautifully simple, and no feature has been included that has not been requested by the users themselves. eva is a simple to use app: when you open it for the first time you choose a category and video starts playing instantly. No need to log in or sign up, unless you want to record a video or engage with people by liking and commenting on videos. Taking a video is a personal experience, as it requires the user to hold down a button for the entirety of the recording. The patent-pending Simon feature allows the user to choose from 36,000 filter options to make their videos beautiful.
Indeed, the purpose of the app itself is an experience based entirely on engagement with other people through video. WAE worked to create a system that allows people to share incredible moments and experiences with other users across the world, gaining the most up close and personal insight into the extraordinary lives or cultures of people who they may never otherwise have the opportunity to see. The imminent release of channels will take engagement to another level, as users will be able to watch content specific to their interests and likes.
Project Marketing
The marketing strategy for eva is based around content and communities. eva is the real video social network for real people, with real interests. On eva, users find communities and content that inspire, entertain and surprise about the everyday.
As a social network, it is imperative that eva is seen to be active on other social media platforms too. The marketing team engages with eva users across the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, by sharing user-generated content. Not only does this encourage new users to download the app, but it also ignites a sense of community amongst existing users of the video social network.
Forbidden Technologies have also instructed PR agency Chameleon to work on a series of exciting campaigns for eva. The first campaign, a survey on people’s attitudes to men with lots of facial hair, has garnered a lot of media attention, with a reach of over a quarter of a billion people in more than 90 online publications worldwide. Other campaigns in the pipeline include a Guinness World Record attempt and ‘The House’, a Big Brother style channel but with mobile devices. All these campaigns will be played out on the video social network, inviting users to engage and collaborate with eva.
Project Privacy
As a company that is built on the strength of cloud technology, Forbidden is often questioned over the security of the cloud. Having our own proprietary codec means users’ information and personal details are securely stored in the cloud. Even though eva is a public network, it ensures users are protected by enabling the community to flag inappropriate content on the eva feed, and only takes two flags for the video to be instantly removed from the social network. If unwanted comments appear on a video, the user who created the video can delete the comment.
Best 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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