THE CLIENT: shape by ideo

THE ROLE: COMMUNICATION DESIGN (VISUAL DESIGN, COPY, UX AUDITING, PROTOTYPING, VIDEO SCRIPTING)

The CONCERN: businesses need a way to prototype and test ideas quickly.

THE QUESTION: is it possible to simplify and scale the ideo process?

THE SHORT ANSWER: yes, and we created the space to do it.

The Skill Set: ux writing, Content Design, Video Scripting, Storyboarding + brand voice direction.

Shape is a digital innovation tool designed to build, test, and refine your ideas, made by IDEO.

It emerged from IDEO’s years of experience working on open innovation, and a deep dive into the needs and difficulties confronted by teams working to solve tough challenges. The team put a lot of their heart, soul, and personal experience into building Shape—at a time when Mural, Miro, and FigJam didn’t exist yet.

Shape is a digital platform for small teams and large organizations alike to collaborate on new ideas, share knowledge, and get feedback directly from customers. I was a part of the lean consultant team that researched, built, and launched this project into the world—I was also the primary “brand voice” for the entirety of the experience, writing and storyboarding explainer videos, building marketing flows, writing/editing site copy, creating content and auditing the UX builds as-needed.

We did a lot of research to build tools that would function well for ALL of our clients. From enterprise software companies to solopreneurs, Shape was designed to be modular enough to help everyone apply design thinking to their creative projects. We built 10 unique landing pages, each designed to funnel a specific customer type into the experience best suited for their needs.

Once you’re signed up, you can immediately start exploring the content library we seeded the collaboration tools with. We built templates, created test projects, condensed case studies, and so much more—with the hope that by making these materials available in-app, our customers would find the inspiration to use our templates to create their own innovation projects. We also put a bite-sized version of our Challenge framework in the app, so that our customers could effectively build their own innovation challenges, supercharging their organizations with design thinking. There’s even a powerful testing tool built-in, so that you can build, iterate and test all in the same place.

This product ultimately functions as a collaboration space, an educational tool, a self-guided design thinking framework, and so much more. We had great hopes for Shape, but it was ultimately deprecated and the team moved on to help build Figma. I will always be inspired by the scale of this endeavor, and I’m proud to have put my own artistic voice behind it.