I've been working on a simple idea which takes the principles of agile product development and applies them to the creative process, cunningly titled 'agile creative development'. This agile approach applies agile principles to various fields, emphasizing the importance of involving the client/customer in every step. If you work in a creative / design field, this article could solve some common headaches.
The mission
Loops has been in the market for 6 months, but it's really been 10 years in the making - from Guided Collective to ThinkSprint to Loops. Agile creativity has been at the center of Loops since the very beginning, it is behind the iterative process of testing that Loops is based on.
Guided Collective was built on the insight that great creative ideas can come from wider places than design and marketing agencies – product teams/designers, for example, or data scientists, development teams, creative teams, technologists and digital entrepreneurs – so we brought those brains into the mix too. Diversity of thinking makes for richer creativity.
ThinkSprint
ThinkSprint was built on the insight that consumer innovation can be slow-moving purely using in-house teams, like a marketing team or development team, and can become very expensive when involving collaboration with management consultancies. But innovators in startups have huge amounts of value to add, so bring those brains into the mix too. Diversity of thinking makes for robust concepts and design decisions.
With both models, we proved that the brightest minds can be assembled, on the same page and coordinated over the Internet to respond quickly and brilliantly to complex briefs like:
"What does the future of screens look like in 3-5 years time?” or “How can we capture the value back that we are losing to the emerging craft spirits sector?”
However, in retrospect the missing part of the chain was always the lack of any direct consumer input/feedback into the development process of these creative ideas and project goals.
Where Loops comes in
Enter Loops. We've taken the same agile principles that underpin the modern product development process – namely using a fast, iterative approach – and applying them to a modern creative process, hence the name, ‘Loops'.
This agile approach applies agile design practices to any creative output from a creative agency by taking user experience and user stories/feedback from a test into the design process. As a result, the final product can confidently avoid any significant danger of failure because user experience has been involved heavily in any essential creative decisions.
I want to share the insights, mental models, and technology we're developing because if you work in creative commercial jobs, they could genuinely make your life and the life of your full team easier and the work even better.
Why should I care about the agile design process?
We built Loops because we were frustrated by the amount of energy that gets repeatedly wasted through typical visual design, product design and creative practises.
Whether it's the age-old problems like inefficient pitches, last minute stakeholder curveballs that eat into the weekend of the entire team, or the highest paid person's opinion carrying the day, even when it's clearly uninformed, these recurring pain points are fixable using agile methodology on creative projects.
Strategic, creative, and design jobs should be engaging, guided by logical good ideas, and loads of fun. They shouldn't be frustrating, struggling to focus, stressful and a drain.
But the pain points above are accepted as the norm so they keep happening. Tools and digital products that use a agile design methodology are essential for your team and business to change this.
As Einstein pointed out, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
That's why we have designed a better way.
Human creativity is a superpower in a machine age, but selling creative thinking is never easy.
We believe that great creative thinking will become an increasingly valuable commodity. Especially for developing creative projects.
Whilst AI will accelerate many creative tasks and even automate some others, it can't connect dots in the ways a human brain can. Putting the two together has huge potential. https://www.useloops.com/blog/how-ai-can-impact-the-creative-marketing-process
Ideas that TRULY have success in cutting through the noise and RESONATING with your audience are worth a lot of money to create. But if you cannot PROVE that your audience and customers care, they may never leave the drawing board.
This quote sums it up perfectly.
Why now?
1. Attitudes towards a customer-centric development process are evolving from ‘nice to have' to ‘must have'.
To develop products, services, and content that customers really want, you need to speak to them to get feedback early on and often.
The problem is that existing research approaches don't go with the flow of creative development and are often bolted on at the end, instead of being implemented iteratively throughout the process. Furthermore, these approaches are solely owned by insights and research teams, when they should also become part of the toolkit for the developers and designers who create the ideas.
2. Closing the gap between Insights and Design
Using this agile methodology as a solution, creators get closer to the insight, and the research and insights teams can be freed up to be more strategic. A win–win.
Empowering strategy, creative, and designers teams/developers with instant access to consumer insights/feedback throughout the creation process means that progress and success happens faster because debates are informed by customer feedback rather than subjective opinions.
As Alec Levin, the founder of Learners (a brilliant learning resource for UX, Design and Research), noted: “We're seeing the democratisation of research and insights across organisations.
3. AI is removing the limits to learning
Qualitative data is where we find the good stuff e.g. the ‘why' behind how people think like they do. For creating a project, product design, and innovation, unlocking this is essential.
To get your hands on qualitative data, you'd probably run a few focus groups with around eight people at a time, perhaps along with some depth interviews conducted one at a time. It might take a few weeks to set this up, and someone would need to be available to synthesise the thoughts and opinions, which takes days.
We're experimenting with deep learning that will do qualitative synthesis for you e.g. You can write any open question like “What are the top 3 things people care about” or “What is the core message” and the AI will understand the question, apply it to the data and give you a contextually accurate answer in seconds.
4. AI used in conjunction with human creativity
Therefore instead of slow learning from a handful of people, an AI-powered tool like Loops means you can learn fast from hundreds. You can get results in hours rather than weeks. To be clear, this doesn't supplant human brainpower, it augments it.
We're only scratching the surface of what is possible, but the big implication of this tech for people who work in strategy, creative and design fields is a ten-fold increase in the ability to understand what resonates with your audiences and develop and complete projects using this information.
What’s next?
The “agile creative system”.
An end to end creative design process approach powered by conversation data, crowdsourced concepts, and consumer validation, that any team can adopt to accelerate and amplify their capabilities.
I'll talk about this in the next article and explain how global clients have involved the ‘agile creative system' in every major design process.
