Hill Holliday Whiteboards Digital Idea, Literally

Four years ago, ad agency Hill Holliday launched Project Beacon as a digital innovation lab dedicated to "rapid prototyping of digital products and services that move the agency and its clients forward." 

Now, working with design and development company IdeaPaint, the shop is debuting Bounce a new mobile app that mimics a whiteboard by allowing users to capture, edit, organize, and share the output of work sessions, meetings, and brainstorm sessions. 

The free app is currently available for iOS, and will be available for Android devices later this summer. Already, many current IdeaPaint customers are using it, and Hill Holliday will be sharing it with its clients as well. 

This project was designed to bring IdeaPaint’s dry erase paint into the digital world. With more than 150,000 installations worldwide, the company's dry erase paint transforms virtually any smooth surface into an erasable canvas. Now, the company's first digital product enables the "wall" to share photos, notes, discussion points with anyone who also has the app. 

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"We have been thinking about creating an app for over a year," says Jen Reddy, VP Marketing, IdeaPaint. "The simple reason being it was a tool our customers were asking us for. We pride ourselves on understanding what our clients want and need to keep innovating.  

The way they ‘work off the wall’ is very intuitive, and when the work session or brainstorm is over, everyone takes out their phones to take pictures. But then what happens?  Most times, the pictures go do die on their camera roll or they clog up the teams emails as an attachment. We thought there was a better way to keep collaboration going long after the work session ends." 

Still, it wasn't easy to develop a functional tool.

"There are many different 'collaboration' apps on the market, but very few that make it simple for the user to capture, annotate, comment, [and] collaborate fast and efficiently," says Reddy. "Our customers want to keep moving through their day, not get caught up in features that complicate the project."

As a result, IdeaPaint worked with Project Beacon to create a “wish list” of elegant, useful features that would enable the user to share their thinking with teams in a productive way. "Our paint product allows teams to have a boundless canvas to create and solve.  This app is a natural extension of 'the wall,' helping them get to results, faster," says Reddy.

One challenge was selecting an appropriate name. "There's a lot of pressure when naming a product," says Reddy. "But once we hit on Bounce, we knew had the right name. It met all our criteria. It’s what you do with ideas when you’re working through them with other people - bounce ideas around. It’s active: it connotes effortless change in direction while maintaining momentum. It works as a verb - I'll Bounce this to everyone later. And most of all, it’s playful and fun – colloquial and familiar.  It felt like the perfect fit for IdeaPaint, who has a very strong, recognizable brand."

Before the app's official launch, the Bounce development team members were very "careful to do their homework," and kept users involved through the design and development process.

"We did a series of contextual interviews with IdeaPaint customers in a variety of industries up front, and ran a several-month closed beta to get early versions of the app in the hands of real users and get their feedback," says Jamie Scheu, VP of Experience Design, Hill Holliday. 

One early tester was Robby Bitting, director of marketing at MassChallenge. “Bounce helps us collaborate by allowing us to loop in members who miss brainstorms," says Bitting. "Simply capturing and sharing notes is much easier now. We’re also able to continue conversations around visual content like wireframes and infographics, since we can catalog and annotate original drafts. But my favorite feature is that Bounce acts like a magic wand for my whiteboard pictures. The contrast is amazing,which makes the images more usable.”

Both Hill Holliday and IdeaPaint think this new app has potential to “disrupt” the workplace, as well as challenge the $53 billion mobile enterprise app market currently dominated by Apple, Microsoft, Evernote, Dropbox, LogMeIn.

While it remains to be seen if this app will become a billion-dollar platform, it does represent what Hill Holliday had in mind when it originally launched its innovation hub. "Project Beacon started a couple of years ago as a sandbox for us to start working with technologies that may not be mainstream today, but will definitely have an impact on our clients and their customers in the future," says Scheu. 

The first year, team members set the goal of completing 12 projects in 12 months and achieved it. "Some projects were for clients, like the interactive TV Web app we built on the Xbox One entertainment console for Dunkin' Donuts during Shark Week last year -- the first interactive experience of its kind for live TV on that platform.

"Others have been for ourselves, like BrandFeed, a social content analytics platform, or Glitch, an SMS platform built on top of our IT ticketing system that has helped reduce printer downtime by 75%. Others were simply experiments, proofs of concept, or fun hacks -- like wiring up a piano keyboard out of Dunkin' Donuts munchkins, or using an EEG headset to control the colors of a Phillips Hue smart lightbulb," he said.

Then, in the last 6-9 months, agency executives expanded the charter of Beacon to be more market-focused. "Rather than starting with a new technology and seeing what we can make with it, we're looking for opportunities to build things that people want, first and foremost, and then picking technologies second as a means to deliver the intended experience," says Scheu.

"We say we exist to 'make things for people from brands.' This may sound simplistic, but forces us to ask two important and clarifying questions about any new project: What do people actually want from this brand? And what could we make that could only come from this brand?"

Ultimately, Bounce is a great example of how Project Beacon has evolved, he says. "Together with IdeaPaint, we identified an existing behavior that could be significantly improved, and developed a technology solution to that problem that created a superior user experience, and made complete sense to be coming from IdeaPaint." 

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