We are hired by biotechnology companies to produce websites that promote a product in a fun way. Applied Biosystems was looking to sell their Veriti-brand line of thermal cyclers. Our creative director met up with them & came up with an idea that was inspired by a JibJab seasonal video where you upload a photo of yourself & it pastes it on a dancing person. This would require our video team to record some dancers with motion capture technology & some Flash coding by Jason & Brian, which is well within our capabilities (we have a very skilled team).

After coming up with list of titles that were both biotech & dance-related, I went to work sketching some ideas, breaking down the steps required for the user to create their own video, & making very rough models of the site using some preliminary video captures our video team provided as placeholders.

From there, I created a paged PDF outline the process, a step-by-step prototype.

The dancers needed a stage, so we came up with a list of venues for our dancers: jungle, beach, snow, & the dance floor. Cheesy was ideal, so I began to plug environmental-related elements that looked gaudy, but cohesive. We also had to promote the product as much as we can, so I introduced elements with plain surfaces so we can incorporate text fields in Flash. Note the billboard the tugboat is towing:

In the final stretch, after we have a working Flash prototype for testing, we were finding that people were overlooking the stage select screen for some reason. Early testers overlooked the stage select screen for some reason:

The best solution was to split this into two parts, but we didn’t have too much time to create a new page. My solution was to make the steps more specific by adding step badge markers, explicitly labeling that on this page, there are two steps required. We hoped this would make it more obvious to the user. It worked! A simple solution with minimal development time.

Try it out! You need an image on your computer that you can upload.