Raphael Thys
This post was originally published here.
Agile AR Design processes toolkit serves a helpful paradigm for collaborative way of design and developing new AR experiences that breaks it into groups of subtasks to make the process more structured to navigate through. In this article I intend to educate on bullet-proof processes and tools that help to deliver best value with realistic efforts for the timeframe of the project. Let’s talk about the planning stage of the project based on the agile method.
20 years ago Agile methods were used to manage work of developers, nowadays it’s much more than that, it’s a system that helps teams to be more adaptable to changes based on structured communication with a customer. While there’s always room to improve, I adopted bits of agile methodology to a certain extent that makes sense for the small size of the team.
The map of AR Design Processes includes 5 steps: Planning, Ideation, Prototyping, Development and finally Measuring of Success. The rule of thumb is NEVER SKIP PLANNING.
The Planning stage includes collecting ready materials from a client and communicating over specific questions, such as goals of campaign, target audience and existing brand guidelines and assets, and timeline. Usually, all of this information is sent to the AR creator in the document called Brief. Very often when working with smaller brands they won’t be able to compose a brief themselves and it’s up to a Creator/Team to collect information for better understanding.
This is part that must include following thing:
- What is objective? What is the overall objective of your campaign and how can AR contribute to that? What would you like the audience to do after interacting with the effect?
- Does the client have any ongoing marketing campaign that can tie to AR filters?
- What is the brand’s tone of voice?
- What is the message they want to convey using an AR filter?
- Does the client have pre-made brand assets that you can use?
- Does the client have brand guidelines?
- Does it tie to some kind of timeline? Or what timeline should it follow?
- Where is it going to be shown? Which platform is Instagram? Facebook Ads? Snapchat? TikTok? Web? Location-based?
When you answer all the questions above and document the following materials into a written document (Google Doc or Word doc), you have a Brief. Any kind of slides available on brand guidelines, visual identity or brand guidelines will be helpful as well.
I generally find it very helpful to compose a Mind Map at this point getting all collected information on client’s preferences. What is a Mind Map?
“A mind map is a diagram used to represent the affinities or connections between many ideas or things. Understanding relationships is the starting point for design. Mind Maps are a method of analyzing information and relationships.”
Here’s an example of how MindMap should look like.
- Goals of campaign
It’s important to define the goal of the experience. It helps to generate ideas that target specific goals and to set the right expectations from measuring the success of it. Examples of campaign goals can be:
communicating your values to new broader audiences, Internal communication and celebrations , Drive to store/e-store, Branding / Awareness of a new product, Gamification etc.
To learn more about this topic, you can read our article: https://flamingofilter.co/blog/reasons-why-brands-need-filters
- Target audience
Try subdividing a market into a number of groups where the people in each group have some commonality, or similarity.
- Geographic segmentation (to take account for regional differences)
- Distribution segmentation (when and where do they use filters) e.g. from facebook AR ad or from scanning QR code
- Price segmentation (is this product a luxury product?)
- Demographic segmentation (This is the most common one, f.e. advertising something expensive to 20–25 y.o. doesn’t make sense)
- Time Segmentation (F.e. Christmas AR card is seasonal)
- Psychographic or Lifestyle (value, behaviors, emotions, perceptions, beliefs and interests f.e. looking pretty on Social Media is important to many)
- Existing brand guidelines
Usually a brand already has a message that it tries to convey with its marketing campaigns. Message is told through a specific tone of voice and style. For example, some brands prefer realism over cartoon-ish style. Others prefer memes over serious tone of voice. Brands usually have established color palettes and fonts.
- Assets
Are there any 3D models or 2D images of the product? Or specific VFX elements tied to the brand? What existing assets need to be used in the AR experience and is it possible to optimize it? Instagram filters weight just up to 4mb, while Snapchat is max 8mb. Are there specific animations to be used? Is it possible to use ready-made or it needs to be customized? Or even made from scratch. Asset planning in advance is super important because creation/optimisation of the assets in 2D and 3D software sometimes takes longer than assembling the AR experience itself.
- Timeline
First of all, you need to know whether the project has a set deadline. If so, split the projects into smaller tasks, and assign it to the team, who’s doing what. Get yourself and familiar who’s the contact person for that specific phase of the project. Inside our team, we use Notion and Gantt charts for planning the projects, which can be easily shared with a customer. Sometimes, a customer has its own tools for planning and tasks (f.e. Kanban boards), then we use those.
Here you go, planning is not that time consuming but helps tremendously to keep the process transparent for everyone.
In the next blog post, we’ll talk about the Ideation process for AR campaigns and how to spend no more than a couple hours to generate the best ideas. I cover the tools such as Brainstorming, Voting, Benefit matrices and the Rule of 3.