1.

When it comes to challenging journeys and/or tasks, help users eat their elephant, one bite at a time!

THE CHALLENGE: Mission Creation

Based on our qualitative research with a diverse range of people, creating a Mission/ video campaign is a daunting task and people usually don’t know where to start unless they have run campaigns or set up open calls before. It needs various communication skills and can have many variables like a tangible goal, timeline, target individuals or organizations, rewards, etc. We wanted to make sure that the process is easy to use for both experienced and novice campaign creators.

OUR SOLUTION

a. Chunking information:
We broke down the Mission creation flow into 5 steps. This made it easier to navigate and digest, while making it more adaptable to our users’ needs and level of experience. This means that our Mission creation experience makes it simple and fast to create simpler Missions and provides various features that can support the needs of those who are creating more complex Missions.

b. A guided and educational flow:
We decided to give confidence to users and guide them throughout the process by educating users, providing examples, building conversational and intuitive UI, and a simple-to-understand input box.

c. Limiting the number of characters allowed in text boxes:
We lowered the number of characters that could be written in the first step of Mission creation where users tell their Missions’s story, to 400. We did this for 4 reasons:
- Concise communication to motivate viewers to read and absorb the information.
- Encouraging video usage as the main medium for communication
- Ease of social sharing

2.

When users want to create content with a specific criteria, help them overcome their fear of blank canvas.

THE CHALLENGE: Video Creation

Content creation in essence is a creative pursuit. Therefore, just like how artists have a hard time starting a new work or writers feel pressured when starting a new story on a blank page, people feel pressured when creating content with a specific goal and certain limitations, even the Mission creators themselves. On in-it videos need to be under 1-minute and touch on all the points that the Mission creator has requested (the “ask” or the “prompt”). On the other hand each Mission creator had a different set of criteria for the videos they needed depending on their use case, but a lot of times people didn’t consider them or didn’t touch on all the points the Mission creator was looking for. So we asked ourselves how can we make the process easier for our users while making sure they respond to the “ask” of the Mission succinctly and follow the criteria to the tee? 

In our ideation we came up with a really good solution yet we didn’t have the budget to develop. I’m going to put it here 👇 maybe someone would find it useful for their product.

THE SOLUTION WE PROTOTYPED BUT COULDN’T DEVELOP

A new way for video creation in which the upload section would consist of an interactive video creation section that worked like Q&A. The questions that were defined by the Mission creator would show up and users would record themselves answering each question. At the end the videos would stitch together to make that person’s video.

We tested this idea using a simple prototype and the results were impressive: The participants created the video they were happy with about 4 times faster. This was mainly because they felt more confident, were short and to-the-point, and could just rerecord the question they were not happy with -not the whole video. Therefore, they were happier with their video and didn’t need to record multiple times.

On the other hand it would have given us the advantage from the data standpoint. Because it is hard to analyze videos and extract data from them, but this way we could have done it in a more efficient way. For example, you could create summary videos using for instance the answer to only one question from all the videos, which otherwise would be a lot of work.

3.

When dealing with sensitive topics, make anonymity a useful and safe option.

THE CHALLENGE: Sharing videos for sensitive topics

Many people are don’t feel safe or are uncomfortable sharing some topics and stories on their social media. Yet everyone deserve to be heard.

OUR SOLUTION

We created Anonymous upload feature to empower people to feel safe and comfortable to speak up and share videos of their stories. Here are some considerations we had for designing our anonymous feature:

a. Optional anonymity:
Mission creators had the option to choose if they are interested in receiving anonymous videos in their Missions or not. Many of them chose to not do it because they believed they cannot guarantee the credibility and truthfulness of those videos.

b. Pixelation:
For anonymizing videos we added pixelation feature. So that a video could be posted anonymously (without name) in its original form (no pixelation), a little pixelated or very pixelated. We did not keep a copy of the original video in the back-end when it was pixelated so that no one would be able retrieve it from our database.

c. Using humor to ease up a stressful experience:
Based on our research, most people feel stressed when sharing a sensitive story. That’s why we decided to show the level of pixelation through a fun image comparison. This also saved us money and time from development standpoint.

d. Contacting anonymous videos through comments:
Those who wanted to contact creators of anonymous videos, could leave comments with their information in the video page, so that the video contributor could choose to contact them if they want.

SOLUTIONS WE DIDN’T CREATE:

a. Voice change
b. Partial pixelation
c. Anonymous chat (direct chat with the video creator)

4.

When designing high—friction features, make motivation your priority.

THE CHALLENGE: Contributing to Missions

Creating and uploading a video is a high friction task. Therefore we wanted to add ways to motivate people to contribute their videos and show their support for a Mission even without uploading their video, as well as making a low-friction way to contribute to a Mission.

OUR SOLUTION

a. Goals:
By setting a goal a Mission becomes more like a petition. Mission Creator defines that if a certain number of videos gets uploaded, they would reach out to an individual/organization or take a certain action.

b. Reward:
Rewarding the most popular videos, is another way to encourage users to create better quality content and spread the word to get others to like their content and increase in-it’s exposure. Rewards can be either monetary or non-monetary.

c. Deadline:
This is more suitable for Missions that have a reward or a goal that is time sensitive.

f. Resist (fist icon):
We added the Fist icon as a symbol of strength and resistance (instead of “like”) so that even if someone can’t share their story or doesn’t have a story to share, they would still be able to contribute to a Mission and show your support for it in a low-friction way.

d. Pinning videos:
We designed the page in a way that the Mission creators can pin videos on the top of Highlight videos section (Mission creators’ videos by default get pinned on the top of the page). This would make contributors feel valued and seen.

5.

When dealing with sensitive data make sure to over-communicate and bring redundancy into (some) flows.

THE CHALLENGE:

From the beginning we knew we are dealing with more sensitive issues and people who have a lot at stake when sharing these stories. So, we needed to make sure that these stories would not get in the wrong hands. While in our terms of service we had stated that by sharing their videos on our platform people give ownership to “in-it” as a platform to use the videos and share them with third party partners and collaborators, it turned out that many people hadn’t read this and were not aware of it. So, we had to double check that they were aware of this term when uploading their videos. Yet, time after time it became apparent to us that even when they accepted that their videos would be used to give more publicity to the Mission, they were not ok with some organizations or individuals to use their content, and wanted to first know how their content will be used. 

EXAMPLE:

You have created content about about a feeling of loss after abortion for a Mission about mental health. Now a senator wants to use your story, for limiting women’s reproductive rights. While you initially gave permission for the use of content, you might not have thought about it being used out of context and now you don’t want it to be used by a specific individual or organization with malignant intention. 

OUR SOLUTION:

While legally we were not required, we added an extra step in which the Content seeker could send a download request to the creator of the video to explain their purpose before being able to download it. This request can be accepted or denied by the creator of the video.

6.

When you have a lot of content, make sure you have ways to make sense of them.

THE CHALLENGE:

When there is a lot of content uploaded to a page, It’s hard to show their value and extract information and data from them. This is especially important for those who are looking for content for a specific topic/cause (researchers, reporters, law makers, etc) or from a specific location (local news, Members of congress, NGOs, etc).

OUR SOLUTION:

a. Tags:
Tags help categorize content in order to make it easier to find relevant content. They are first defined by the Mission creator in the last step of the Mission creation, then video contributors will choose the tag(s) that match their content when uploading their video. Finally, the audience and the content seekers can use these tags to filter the videos and find what they are looking for on a mission page.

Example 1: tags for a mission about opinions on student debt forgiveness can be: Agree, Disagree, Neutral

Example 2: tags for a mission about impact of sanctions can be: Financial pressure, mental pressure, inflation, immigration, Lack of medicine 

b. Location:
Our location filter only showed the locations that were available in that Mission (data derived from video’s metadata and the upload form’s location question).

SOLUTIONS WE DIDN’T CREATE :

a. Automatic content curation:
While for some of the Missions we created curated content to summarize or feature the best videos from that Mission, our platform could not do that by itself because this feature required a lot of time and budget to be developed.

b. Keyword search:
Because we didn’t have have transcription feature for the videos it was not really beneficial to add this feature.

7.

Two Dilemmas…

a. Moderation

PROBLEM:

I’m a big believer in freedom of speech and against censorship. I actually have strong feelings about this because I grew up in an authoritarian country and how dangerous it is to limit what people. That’s why from the beginning we said after a content is uploaded to a Mission, its Mission creator and others who have contributed to that particular Mission will get a notification informing them about it. Then they can review and report it if it is not following the ask of their Mission or is not abiding by our Terms of use and PrivacyPolicy.  

But this turned out to be the most talked about issue in every meeting we had with individuals or organizations who wanted to create a Mission. They were all fearful of bots, trolls and those who would maybe hijack the Mission with their lies for their own agenda. So, they wanted the videos to be verified by an admin and then show up in the Mission page. 

DILEMMA:

We stuck with what we had (post-upload moderation) but I still don’t know if this was the right decision or not.

b. Authenticity vs. motivation

PROBLEM:

As mentioned in the previous point, we created various ways for our Mission creators to motivate their community or audience to contribute to their Mission. One of these was reward. While Mission creators wanted to be able to provide reward for the Missions they created (Mostly non-monetary), content seekers who later on wanted to use those content, had issue with authenticity of any content that was uploaded because of some sort of reward. The rewarded didn’t get used by Mission creators that much, and the ones who used it had less social connectivity and were working on less sensitive topics.

DILEMMA:

We prioritized Mission creators over Content seekers and kept the reward feature; thinking people have good judgement about how they want to run their Mission. I’m not certain if in the long run this would have turned out to be the best decision, yet it definitely could allow us to better understand users’ behaviors and made it adaptable for use cases like competitions and challenges.