We had the opportunity to connect with Dmitry Ogievich, CEO of Banuba, a Belarus-based start-up that uses their 40+ patents to build augmented reality products.

Since graduating from the 2018 Stanford d.school Design Thinking Boot Camp, Dmitry and his team have raised $7M in funding and grown their user base to 1.5M active monthly users.

In addition to hard work and a talented team, Dmitry attributes the growth and trajectory to what he’s learned at Stanford. Here, we share some of his insights about the cycle from user research to end product.

Gamify school lessons during COVID-19

Proactively listening to users is a core tenet of design thinking — and can occur in places we might not initially expect. When a teacher from California reached out to Support asking for help to add face filters to her videos, Dmitry and his team saw a golden opportunity to better understand users during this challenging time.

One of the major changes caused by COVID-19 is in education — where student instruction and engagement are now 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.

Dmitry and his team soon learned that first graders were not studying effectively online, so teachers began recording their lessons using AR face filters. It turned out that those filters were helping this teacher keep her students’ attention focused during their virtual school lessons. The children were delighted — and engagement in online assignments increased.

With regular engagement with customers and quick prototypes that create dozens of designs a week, Dmitry and his team can get useful products in the hands of users when they need them. Since then, Banuba has experimented with touchless interfaces to safely use public products and other technologies.

But it wasn’t always like this…

In the beginning, the start-up invested tremendous effort to develop technologies and deep research expertise. Still, they could not retain users for apps that they thought would go viral. They expected that adding new features would increase engagement, but on the contrary, many users started unsubscribing.

“We believed our product was important and useful. But this made us need to think again. We needed a new approach to demonstrate our competitive advantage.”

So Dmitry enrolled in the d.school Executive Design Thinking Bootcamp to see if design could help him look at his approaches in a different way.

From Stanford to Minsk…bringing design thinking from the d.school back to Banuba

“Start using the method on the way back home,” instructors Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn at the Stanford d.school Executive Education program taught. In July 2018, Dmitry returned to Minsk from California in the late evening with this takeaway:

Stanford d.school’s uniqueness is that in a short time, they change your point of view, show you new values which you haven’t noticed before, and give you an experience that you would normally get in a couple of years of work. This is where I realized our faults. I realized that the stories about the value of the product weren’t impactful.

If you create something based only on assumptions about people’s problems — without communicating with them, and without observing them, you can get a product that solves imaginary needs.

The next morning, the team gathered for the company’s first design thinking workshop, unearthing unexpected insights about their users.

Since then, the whole team — from product managers to engineers — uses design thinking to create their products; based on but not limited to the following design principles below:

• Empathy — going to the field and communicating with users.

• Defining — creating an empathy map and point of view based on emotional stories from the previous phase, and ultimately formulating an insight (a specific, current problem) on which the team will work.

• Ideation — generating ideas on how to solve the problem.

• Prototype — very quickly, creating what the team thinks will be a Game Changer.

• Testing — testing the prototype, and refining.

In practice, the process is flexible and not linear; the stages run in parallel and can be repeated iteratively. Defining the crux of the issue, analyzing, breaking it down, diving into details, synthesizing, putting all the pieces back together, and repeating this several times — all occur in the course of two days to a week.

A series of seemingly simple exercises can also help unleash creativity, remove blocks of fear of error, and create an environment where criticism is accepted as a gift rather than something offensive. One of Banuba’s favorite exercises is “Yes-And,” where everyone on the team continues to develop ideas proposed by others.

We have learned to spot the problems and do things differently, not like we used to. We are no longer scared of mistakes and critics.

Lesson 1 — Start with empathy, not ideation

Dmitry is quick to admit that their team has made many mistakes in the beginning — primarily from believing that a “good idea” was all that mattered. Without empathy research, the company was at a loss for what users truly wanted.

We decided which face filters people would like. We simply ignored the users’ opinions and the first two stages — empathy and problem definition.

He shared with us how design thinking and what he learned at Stanford helped him and his team propel forward.

Insight: Assumptions about demographics were wrong

Initially, the developers built the product for people they thought would use it most — women from 18 to 25. From research, they found the primary audience to be parents aged 35+. These parents used the app to have fun with their children and distract them from watching TV.

This insight led to My Banuba: Family Face Filters app, which had exclusive content for parents and kids. The idea hinged upon the insight that technology could be used in ways to bring the family together, from online back to offline.

Insight: Users, especially children, wanted greater interactivity

After using Face Filters on the app, many parents said many children started to ask questions like, “Mommy, let’s talk to the little panda.” This insight led to adding a video-calling capability to the product, allowing users to call their loved ones who could then wear a fun filter.

In short, starting with empathy let the team extract valuable user stories from noise. They sorted out non-existing problems early in development, reducing the cost of mistakes and creating a top-rated product that users enjoyed.

Lesson 2 — Proactively seeking specific feedback

Yet, developing empathy for users was a muscle that the start-up needed to strengthen over time. 

We expected that users were willing to give us feedback themselves. Now we know that if we want to know something, we must ask for it ourselves.

When asking users for feedback on a product, it can often be challenging to extract meaningful feedback: generic answers, exaggerations, or miscommunications are common as a part of social desirability response bias. People tend to present a favorable image of themselves.

To combat these issues, the team champions certain practices:

• Not being afraid to push users who may initially not seem to have an answer: valuable insights can come from those who don’t initially don’t seem to care much about a question, but were willing to chat.

• Savoring the moments where a person takes a pause and not rushing in to fill the space can lead to rewarding insights.

• Asking open and non-leading questions to learn what a person’s experience was like with the product

With proper empathy research, Dmitry and his team built an audience portrait based on real cases, and build products catered to those audiences. Customers then can be attracted organically to the platform, because they find something that actually meets their needs — giving an added bonus of reducing marketing costs.

Lesson 3 — Find insights in the details

Early on, Dmitry realized that his team missed valuable details which made massive impacts on user experiences. 

Details could only be noticed through communication with users.

Insight: Let users shoot videos without time limits

Interviews with niche audiences, like bloggers and influencers, let the researchers and developers discover the importance of shooting a video with filters and without time limits. While this small detail initially didn’t seem significant, it was a critical priority for this segment of users and competitive advantage.

Insight: The ability to save filters

Another competitive advantage came after applying the empathy process to connect with an actress from Germany who uses the app. She had used Banuba’s AR filter for the avatar for her blog,and needed the ability to save and re-use filters — something competitors did not offer. This insight led to new product offerings like letting users purchase their own filters.

And Lesson 4 — Prototype, again and again

Previously, the development team used to dive head-on and invest in feature development. Still, when the feature ended up lacking a positive response from users, the team didn’t understand why.

Now, the company ethos creates both ‘pretotypes’ and prototypes before development. A prototype is where you check if the product solves the problem as you thought it should. A pretotype is where you check if there is even a problem in the first place.

We used to think that if we had 10 ideas, we would find something successful. But to achieve a couple of commercially successful solutions, you need to filter them out from hundreds or thousands. Let’s say around 200 of these get selected and studied, 20 get prototyped and from those 2 or 3 might go forward. For each chosen idea, others are born, they are also filtered.

But that’s not the end — by testing and iterating based on prototypes, the team can increase their confidence that they will create a product that will genuinely delight users. For example, with a couple of hours of A/B testing setup for face filters, the expenses of development get cut by half. Mistakes become less costly and more manageable — ultimately fostering creativity.

Insight: The need for a native solution

Dmitry’s research and development team went to London and noticed that many people in restaurants and out on the streets were chatting on an iPhone and taking selfies on an entirely different phone. They saw the same thing ten times! The researchers later discovered that people used a different phone since it was specifically equipped with an AI camera.

By pairing the knowledge of technology with field studies, the research team understood that a user’s regular phone could easily provide the same experience. This insight led to a photo editor called “Easy Snap”, eventually harnessing 3.5 million subscribers and rising to the top selfie app in several countries.

By starting from empathy, and then prototyping and iterating, the team could get the best result several times faster by testing and validating many more ideas within the same budget.

Conclusions

Since being a grad of the d.school, Dmitry and his team are in constant communication with users — from listening to those who write in to support, to going out into the streets. By doing so, they have unearthed the insights that have helped their company rebuild itself and transform their product to become successful.

People’s time and money are already consumed by something. What do people spend them on? Can you take your place in their “schedule”? Are you ready to propose a better solution?

Design thinking has given us a second wind. Now we know what we are, not just from our own perspective, but from the eyes of our customers and users. Today, real problems have been solved, and real needs have been met.

Want to bring design thinking to your organization? 

The Stanford d.school is offering the same Design Thinking Bootcamp that Dmitry took now online.

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.

Banuba CEO Dmitry Ogievich and Stanford d.school collaborator Megan Gao contributed to writing this story.