BeeCanvas

Introduction

BeeCanvas

Files, Images, Links, Youtube, SoundClound. Collect and organize everything visually in one place. BeeCanvas is a visual collaboration tool that lets you share and comment a image, links, or other multimedia resources on a canvas whatever you want.

Challenges

How to promote BeeCanvas?

It was important to fully appreciate the challenges people face during their creative work. For deeper understanding, we needed to carry out some user research into the obstacles they encounter and their likely needs. We also had to consider our competitors and our strengths and weaknesses when compared to them.

Situation Analysis 01 : User research

Interviews with potential customers

Gaining an understanding about how creative people actually work, and the kind of productivity tools they use in the field, was crucial. Through in-depth interviews with creatives across many spheres, I found a commonly-mentioned difficulty to be the sharing of rough ideas and organizing various types of files. A clear need for efficient knowledge-sharing was identified. It is a universal challenge for groups of intelligent people collaborating on complex or difficult projects. How can all stakeholders get to see the bigger picture and better understand what the problems might be?

Situation Analysis 02 : Competitor analysis

Research on productivity tools

I had to investigate the existing productivity tools on the market. There are many kinds; tools for file sharing, instant messaging, cloud storage, and visual collaboration. BeeCanvas is itself a visual collaboration platform based on an interactive whiteboard, with some similar competitors like realtimeboard, mural, milanote. Among these existing collaboration tools, it was important to position BeeCanvas strategically and ensure it could have a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Comparison with No.1 Competitor for viral marketing

After identifying out potential customers' needs for visual organization, and researching our competitors, I decided that explaining BeeCanvas by comparing it to Evernote, the No.1 name in productivity tools, would be most effective. I felt this was preferable and more persuasive than contrasting it with similar visual collaboration offerings like Realtimeboard, Mural or Milanote, and highlighting the subtle differences between them. Positioning BeeCanvas as an opposite alternative to Evernote, from the perspective of creative thinking and the management of creative projects, offered a lot of potential scope for viral marketing.

Evernote was the best-known productivity app with a noticeably different user experience to BeeCanvas. I wrote an article explaining what drew me to BeeCanvas as a user. I showed an example from my Evernote which I had collaborated on with my teammates for ideas regarding city branding commercials. We had collated various media files, like youtube videos, web links, pdf files, and music. It had not been easy to make connections between these disparate components and organize everything at a glance on Evernote.

Market Positioning - Outcome

Succesful viral marketing

We saw positive results — 30,000 views and 1,000 shares of the article via SNS and Facebook! The comparison with Evernote was very effective to help people understand quickly how BeeCanvas is a tool for visual creative projects. Offering genuine use case histories was helpful also, because it made it easier to imagine the useful ways in which BeeCanvas could be applied.

Market Positioning - Landing page

An Eye-catching Tagline

Taglines are succinct catchy phrases that capture a product in one word, and it's a very important factor in marketing. We conveyed the idea that BeeCanvas is a visual collaboration tool like Evernote but beyond there, I wanted to highlight how it helps to boost creativity also. So I suggested the following tagline:

”We know your ideas are more than just words.”

I also designed the landing page incorporating the phrase, with an image to complement it nicely.

Provide real-world examples

Based on user research into how our customers use BeeCanvas, I showed several use cases, allowing potential users to visualize how they could use it in their creative work. Because people use these tools in diverse ways depending on their purpose, it was very important in the marketing to provide appropriate examples of uses and applicability.

Video guidance for first users

For beginners, I made basic tutorial videos showing how to use BeeCanvas to make the most of its features.

Takeaway

Beyond the visual design

As a service designer, it's not just screen design, viewing the product with the holistic view from various angles has been a great help in designing the service. I found that the marketing approach to how products are appealing is closely linked to the actual design of the service in a sense that it requires a deep understanding of our potential customers. I was also able to understand our customers conducting the direct CS process, which has been helpful in content marketing.