Building a Creative Online Photo-sharing and Digital Scrapbooking Experience for Tweens
Building something from nothing
COMPANY | Zuzee
CHALLENGE
Creating a brand new experience for a challenging and under-served market in largely self-funded start-up
OUTCOME
An award winning product and service experience that brought tween girls and their parents a simple, joyful, and safe way to create art, express themselves, and share their creations with friends and family
"I love this site”
Zuzee User, age 11
For a lot reasons, but largely because of the Experience Design challenges, Tween girls are an under-served digital technology product market. We created and built Zuzee from concept to launch through user-centred design inside a lean start-up.
Zuzee was originally a hardware wearable concept paired with a software as a service platform concept. Through a complete user-centered concept development and a rapid iterative design process including user research, design session, prototyping and user-centered concept evaluation we created a compelling high-level experience concept but the concept just wasn’t financially viable for a small start-up to fund.
Pivoting
So, as is the case with many start-ups, we pivoted the concept to focus on developing the software service platform first, and build the hardware later. This pivot allowed us to focus on creating an exceptional online experience, and since nothing like Zuzee existed in the market, we spend a lot of time with girls and their parents to determine what they really wanted – what would define the Zuzee experience?
User-centered Design, Lean, and Agile
Through a process of rapid data-driven, evidence-based and iterative design and development using lean start-up and Kanban Agile methods, paired with our unique approach to product and service co-creation, our designers worked with both parents and girls in concepting, prototyping, and evaluation sessions, defining a unique combination of features, application genres and technologies, that recognized the needs of parents as well as tweens in the product design, and the use of new, but appropriate technology to provide the ideal user experience.
Co-creation
Our designers crafted the company’s brand vision, experience and product strategy, built the complex photo management, digital scrapbook creation, editing, and sharing, user account creation and management, parental controls, monitoring and management, print-on-demand service and delivery experience.
In the end we created something that was, part game, part social network, part photo-sharing, and part scrapbook creator - an award winning product experience that brought tween girls and their parents a simple, joyful, and safe way to create art, express themselves, and share their creations with friends and family.