The article below is intended to describe end products at Banuba, which were generated using user-centric design thinking processes. Please also read the complementary article about how design thinking processes have led to these products.
We had the opportunity to connect with Banuba CEO and d.school alum, Dmitry Ogievich. Since graduating from the 2018 Stanford d.school Design Thinking Boot Camp, Dmitry and Banuba have raised $7M in funding and grown their user base to 1.5M active monthly users.
Banuba, a Belarus-based startup, uses more than 40 patents to equip devices with “vision.” This tech lets your phone camera “see,” analyse, and have fun with 3-D human faces.
One of Banuba’s booming consumer apps is “Banuba Face Filters,” which offers real-time 3D masks and augmented reality (AR) face filters, with a Face Filters software development kit at its heart. Beyond providing entertainment to users, this product exemplifies Banuba’s innovative approach and customer-centric philosophy — and is even changing how we engage and interact with each other online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dmitry Ogievich:
Due to the pandemic, the whole world has had to restrict its freedom of movement in many ways. And we want to help overcome these difficult times. Artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality are all working hard to keep people connected yet safe.
Consumer needs have changed. To stay on the market, we need to adapt to the situation, and we are doing that — by using artificial intelligence.
Gamifying school lessons
One of the major changes caused by COVID-19 is in education — where student instruction and engagement are in a completely virtual environment. From a teacher’s perspective, maintaining a child’s attention can be challenging in-person and even more taxing in an online classroom.
Some teachers found a way to keep students more engaged by using Banuba’s AR face filters for online lessons. Banuba discovered this use case when a teacher from California contacted Banuba support, requesting help to add filters on her videos.
It turned out that those filters were helping her keep children’s attention focused on their lessons. Banuba wanted to better understand the challenges of these teachers and soon learned that first graders were not studying effectively online, so teachers began recording their lessons using Banuba’s AR face filters.
Teachers can engage students by donning the face of their favorite animal or changing their voice for parts of a lesson, adding interactivity and variation to normal school lessons.
The children were delighted — and engagement in online assignments increased. Teachers then wanted additional ways to engage students, and came back to Banuba requesting additional features like editing photos and adding text to videos. Now, Banuba is offering free subscriptions for all teachers to Banuba’s Face Filter and Video Maker apps.
(*Instructions for teachers to get Banuba for Education are at the end of this article.)
The larger fight against coronavirus
While helping teachers and students is one way that AR can be leveraged during the pandemic, Banuba is applying their expertise more broadly.
Touchless interfaces using neural networks
Not long ago, the world adopted contactless payments for their convenience and simplicity. Banuba learned from customer interviews that contactless surfaces might serve a different purpose as well: many individuals were afraid of touching public interfaces due to risk of contracting COVID-19.
Washing machines in a laundromat, ATMs, and vending machines are just some examples of machines that required frequent physical interactions. Banuba is leveraging their technologies to make touchless interfaces for day-to-day physical interactions — reducing the risk of spreading the virus and alleviating user fears.
Photo context & background changer
Banuba’s technologies let individuals create and experience “new contexts,” especially when movement to new physical locations is restricted.
After noticing that the number of photos taken through their product was decreasing; Banuba interviewed customers to understand why. The Banuba team validated their initial hypothesis, finding that people felt they had little reason to take pictures while staying at home during the quarantine. Banuba found that users’ motivation for taking photos was to capture and share new experiences, contexts, or environments, but individuals lacked these motivations at home.
That’s when we got the idea to put them into that context. Video background changer technology lets individuals seamlessly create new environments in their own cameras. With our help, you can ‘move’ to the mountains or the sea, or just hide the mess in your house.
Another idea we had to give context to photos is a face-changing technology in pictures. People miss their usual [in-person] interactions, but our neural networks can give them something to talk about or just a reason to cheer up.
How does Banuba design?
Being able to create products that quickly identify and meet user needs stem from design thinking ethos that permeates through the entire organization. This ethos promotes regular engagement with customers, quick prototypes that iterate through nearly a dozen ideas and designs a week, and products in the hands of users when they need them.
We’ll follow up with an additional deep dive with Dmitry about how he has become an advocate for design thinking and learn about breakthroughs in customer insights at Banuba.
Banuba for Education — free access for teachers
1. Install Banuba from the Apple App Store app store or Google Play
2. Open Banuba and do not accept the premium version offer. Go to the limited version of the Banuba.
3. In Banuba, Go to Settings -> Live Chat
4. In the Live Chat, tell the Banuba representative:
Your Name
That you are a teacher at *(Name of School)* in *(City/State/Country)*
What your teaching plans are with the help of Banuba
Confirm that a Product Manager may contact you and interview you about your experience with Banuba
A Customer Support Specialist may ask some minor questions and will provide a promo code for a free subscription to Banuba, which you can redeem in the Apple App Store or Google Play.
Alternatively, teachers can email hello@banuba.com with the topic “Banuba for Education” and include the information from Point 4 above.
Want to bring design thinking to your organization? We are offering the same Design Thinking Bootcamp that Dmitry took this July.
Banuba CEO Dmitry Ogievich and Stanford d.school collaborator Megan Gao contributed to writing this story.