Discover the creative process

To discover the creative process and how collaboration can be leveraged to facilitate it, we conducted two months of generative research, including interviews, survey, competitive analysis and literature review, which offered us tremendous guidance in understanding the project and ideating potential solutions.

01 Research Questions

Creativity through collaboration

As we began the project, it was important for us to better understand how collaboration could fit in here and whether or not it was, in fact, an ideal solution to the problem of creative blocks in everyday life. We narrowed down to three key research questions which would guide us as we moved forward with the project.

  • Creativity

    What barriers exist that are preventing people from exploring creativity and how can we reduce these barriers?

  • Collaboration

    Is collaboration the solution for creative blocks?

  • Community

    What do creative communities look like and how does collaboration play a role in successful online communities?

02 BACKGROUND RESEARCH

Understanding the state of the art

After developing questions to guide our research, we worked to develop a better understanding of what was currently happening in the space of creativity and collaboration. We started out conducting background research around Zazzle’s current state, where they were headed, and a competitive analysis of other companies in the space.

Development of creative products/services

Throughout history, people have been creating tools and services to facilitate creativity. From traditional cameras to digital ones, and from Facebook to Instagram, people have more opportunities to express and share their creativity. We’ll discover next about how Zazzle might fit into this timeline and facilitate creativity in its unique ways.

Categories of competitors

We categorized companies related to Zazzle into three kinds.

Motivation to use

To understand how Zazzle might learn from these competitors, we categorized users’ motivation to use the competitor products into external and internal ones. Right now, most Zazzle’s customers come for external events. It is a challenge for us to learn from these competitor who can bring more intrinsic motivation.

03 generative research

A deeper understanding

Our generative research phase included semi-structured interviews with users, expert interviews, and a survey. We performed an affinity mapping exercise to organize our findings and draw key insights to inform ideation moving forward. We organized our insights into our three main topic areas: creativity, collaboration, and community.

03 survey

Demographics

Overall, we received 95 responses

57.3% of participants are from age

18-24 and 32.3% are from age

25-34 (all from CMU)

63.5% female + 36.5% male

Key Insights

People want to be more creative

81.2% of the people express that they want to be more creative (strongly agree/agree)

Drawing and writing

Most people are interested in creative activities such as drawing and writing

Value individual output

People value their individual output in creative activities

Hobbies involve others

Most people’s hobbies involve other people, from time to time

04 Interviews

Demographics

We interviewed 6 users, with a spectrum from professional, to amateur, to non designers. We also interviewed 3 scholors specialized in creativity and/or collaboration.

2 design professionals (1 digital, 1 non-digital)

2 college students (CMU undergrad)

3 scholars studying related topics

2 local makerspace participants (1 organizer, 1 volunteer)

Key Insights

Barriers to creativity

People experience various barriers to creativity such as lack of confidence, inspiration, expertise, and time or money

Social connections

People enjoy social connection and sense of commeradery felt when working with others

Accessing expertise

Communities are an important place to access resources including tools and expertise

Feelings of ownership

People feel less ownership over projects where they are working with a large group

Affinity Diagramming

We synthesized the 9 interviews into an affinity diagram, and identified 3 key areas to focus on: creativity, collaboration, and community. There are both opportunities and challenges within each area.

05 summary

Opportunities and Challenges

Creativity

We explored how people usually engaged with creative activities, and the motivation behind. We also discovered the key barriers for people, especially novice creators, to create.

Opportunities
1 The visibility of the creation process lowers anxiety to create

What novice designers see are usually the final products of the experts, which are so polished that make them feel intimidated to create. If they do not see the process of creation, they tend to see everything that happens in the middle as magic, something they’ll never be able to do.

2 People feel more creative when creating for others

Almost all interviewees mentioned that they usually have better ideas to create for others, either for a gift or work. There is also greater motivation to customize using Zazzle’s service.

3 Factors that make people more creative: necessity, access to tools, tutor, and inspiration

By talking with scholars at CMU, we summarized four elements that nurture creativity: the necessity to create, such as for work or gifts; the access to tools that are needed; a tutor that teaches skills; and some creative inspiration.

Collaboration

We also discovered people’s experience collaborating with others, and identified the opportunies and challenges around leveraging collaboration to foster creativity.

Opportunities
1 People gain feedback, insights, and help from collaboration

Through interviews, we identified three key values of collaboration: the feedback about own work; offer some insights and inspiration; and the pratical help, either in terms of skills or tools.

2 People feel more comfortable to create when everyone else is a beginner, too

For novice creators, they can feel intimidated to start creating, especially when there’s comparison with more expert designers. However, in an environment where everyone is a beginner, the worry lessens.

Challenges
1 It is more efficient to collaborate in person

One limitation of collaboration is that it usually requires people to come to one physical space for better efficiency. How can we promote collaboration for Zazzle, an online platform, becomes a challenge.

2 Teammates can be irresponsible in collaboration

Even with professional co-workers, accountability and responsibility are still issues organizations find challenging to tackle. Collaborator can be late, lazy, or downright not working. Then, how can we ensure users behave responsibly in the creative collaboration we envision for Zazzle?

3 When novice and experts work together, there needs to be some translation

With the intent to have expert designers help and guide novice designers, we found that such collaboration can be difficult without some mediation. For example, novice might not understand experts’ jargon and design tools.

Community

Besides creativity and collaboration, we were also interested in broadening the scope of collaboration by building a creative community where differents kinds of collaboration can happen.

Similar to the values of collaboration, but communities often also offer the access to more pratical resources, such as the machines shared in the maker space we interviewed, which is the major reason why member joined in the first place.

Opportunities
1 People come to the community for utility reasons, but stayed for social connections

User and scholoar interviews reveal an interesting fact that most people usually join communities for pratical reasons, such as the access to tools or tutorials. However, those who finally stayed, did so because of good social connections, meaning they had a good time with other community members.

2 People stay in communities because they enjoy that they can contribute to others
3 How people receive value from their community: get help, get feedback, get tools
Challenges
1 It is more difficult to connect people online

An online community can be loose and difficult to manage, compared with a physical one.

2 Expressing oneself online can feel intimidating

To express oneself freely online in a creative community that might not be familiar can be challenging.

3 Once people complete their goals, they would leave the community

Studies reveal that most online communies are not lasting. Once members complete their goals for joinning the community, either for money, tool, or company, they leave. How to provide users always with incentives so the envisionary Zazzle creative community can stay active becomes a challenge.