PRODUCT DEFINITION AND DESIGN | DREAMWORKS NOVA

Summary

DreamWorks NOVA was a SaaS company that provided 3D rendering, design, asset management, and versioning solutions for product design, merchandising, and go-to-market initiatives. As lead Product Designer, I conducted interviews with co-workers, animators, and product design experts to create the requirements for a streamlined software suite, which included an Asset Management tool, a Product Configurator, a Material and Color Design tool, a Photography tool, and a 3D Render Queue. I developed a Product Definition document and a User Experience Strategy document, continually mapping requirements back to the interview data I’d collected. This emphasis on understanding the user allowed me to create specifications for simple tools for digital product rendering, reducing the Agile development cycle to 2 weeks for some features.

DreamWorks NOVA was a software-as-a-service company that offered scalable, cloud-enabled photo-real 3D rendering, design, asset management, and versioning solutions for product design, merchandising, and go-to-market initiatives. Clients included Nike, Tommy Hilfiger and Burberry.

The Challenge

Using DreamWorks 3D Renderer and 3D Image Creation Tools as the core technology, create a SaaS (software as a service) suite to take product, color, and material designers from conception to implementation designing products like handbags, footwear and apparel in 3D. I was one of two designers creating a software suite that would consist of an Asset Management tool, a Product Configurator, a Material and Color Design tool, a Photography tool and a 3D Render Queue.

Research

The goal was to map the DreamWorks animation pipeline to the overall Product Design workflow. To become well-versed in the animation pipeline, I interviewed co-workers and animators from DreamWorks so I could understand how information and assets flowed between character artists, animators, and lighting specialists. I dug deep into their process to understand the overall cycle of creating an animated film. Then I interviewed 15 product design experts –among them product designers, material designers, apparel, designers, and footwear designers-- to understand their process and limitations. I mapped their information into organizational and task flows for my counterparts in Product Management who were determining the business needs and requirements. I also presented in-depth reports that included recommendations on what was and was not needed in the tools.

The key findings from the research were that animators had vastly wider needs than product designers when it came to 3D design. While animators are creating entire worlds, product designers would be at best simulating real life lighting and materials, and often colors and materials were decided in advance based on the season and the manufacturer. As a result, animators need thousands of options for colors, lighting, and backgrounds, and product designers need relatively few. This was a breakthrough for our team that allowed us to scale down the needs within the product suite and create something more streamlined faster.

Design & Definition

In my role as Senior Product Designer, I led the definition and discovery around what the NOVA product suite would be based on the research and the business needs. I created a Product Definition document that summarized the major features and differentiators of 6 products. Our envisioned products would support storage, collaboration and 3D rendering. We prioritized our products and created a road map.

Now we could look at competitive products in our space and see how they worked. I analyzed a number of asset management tools to examine specific features, especially around versioning and collaboration. Adobe Lightbox was similar to our vision for a photography tool. And I reviewed a few 3D fashion design tools (such as Browzwear and NedGraphics) that already exist in the space. While no one was approaching this problem as ambitiously as NOVA, there were good models for individual interactions that we were able to leverage.

To help the team and executive management, I created and circulated a User Experience Strategy document that articulated the mission statement, audience, design strategy and metrics for how we could design and measure product success.

I also collaborated with Product Management and technology on user stories and requirements for each software product. I created wireframes, checking in with my colleagues in Marketing, Product and Engineering on a weekly basis to ensure that I was capturing their vision.

I continually mapped the requirements back to the interview data that I had collected. I had to rally against “Why Not?” syndrome. The logic was that the DreamWorks product had more than a Product Designer needed, but “why not” give them all of the lighting, color and shape options? From a UX standpoint, the extra options would add complexity to the product, but from a Product Management standpoint, it was good to be feature rich.

A great example of this was in the Product Design Configuration tool. In this tool, Product designers could take a 3D model and apply the correct color and material and review it against different backgrounds and in different lighting scenarios. Interviewees had told us that today, they look at material and color in 4 different lighting setups: fluorescents (like at the mall), natural daylight, night time light, and in soft light at home. Our tool could perfectly simulate all of those lighting configurations, and a user could easily toggle between them, which was a vast improvement over the current process, in which designers had to physically visit each scenario with a prototype of their product. But giving them all of the lighting set-ups available through DreamWorks tools, or letting them configure their own scenarios, was more than they needed.

Impact

My Product partners agreed that we take both scenarios into usability testing. It was there, after seeing the confusion of the Product Designers around the myriad of options, that they agreed that “Why Not” shouldn’t be the governing philosophy. The usability also helped us capture functional and nomenclature issues that could be resolved before starting development.

• This intentional focus allowed the team to save time and money, shortening the development cycle to 2 weeks instead of 3 for some features, and better customizing the current tech into a simple tool for digital product rendering.

In accordance with my non-disclosure agreement with DreamWorks Animation, I have omitted confidential information from this case study. All information in this case study is expressed by me, and does not necessarily reflect the views of DreamWorks Animation or any of its employees.