Butter 2024
Launching 0->1 pivot to unlock a new positioning in the facilitation market
Overview & Role
Butter Scenes is a platform built for facilitators to create engaging workshops that combine the best of presentation, interaction, and whiteboarding tools—all in an easy-to-use slide builder.
One of the ways to engage was the activity called structured brainstorming, a simplification of the usual whiteboard paradigm. The goal was to create an experience that participants can brainstorm in easily, without being overwhelmed with the learning curve needed to use the software in itself. Through research, it showed up time and time again that canvas tools can overwhelm participants.
As the product designer working on bringing the concept to life, I owned imagining how a simpler experience of a brainstorm activity would take shape as well as what type of functionality it would have, all the way to delivery.
Structured brainstorm became one of the most well-received activities offered inside the platform with constant feedback that it's a much simpler alternative to whiteboarding tools.
Problem & context
I joined Butter at the beginning of a pivot, to bring to life and launch the 0 -> 1 product called Butter Scenes. Butter Scenes is a distilling of years of industry insights in the facilitation realm. It aims at solving pain-points for facilitators that they encountered often such as: it is difficult to maintain engagement in sessions, presentations are too one-way, canvas tools can overwhelm participants and using loads of different tools can overwhelm the facilitator.
Inception & early stages
More than a dozen interviews were conducted to gain deeper insights into the pain points facilitators faced when conducting brainstorming activities using whiteboarding tools. One of the strongest patterns that emerged was the lengthy onboarding process for these tools.
Along with the earlier mention, two of the main challenges in the structured brainstorming activity was envisioning how it would function for different user types and determining the necessary functionalities to ensure it worked effectively in a live session. The two primary user types were the facilitator, who needed moderation controls over the inputs, and the participants, who required the ability to submit their contributions in a simple way.
Thinking & ideation
When it came to the facilitator side, the user could set the structure of their own brainstorming activity by adding as many separate sections as needed. This way, a facilitator could easily create an agenda for the brainstorming session. They could also control the anonimity of notes added as well as the visibility of the sections. During the live session, facilitators had options to enable voting, save important notes, and highlight specific notes. All of this functionality was designed to help facilitators control and moderate the flow of the session effectively.
On the participant side, adding a note had two entry points for ease of access, along with the ability to set a color for personalization.
Improvements after live sessions
After going live with the product and facilitators conducting live sessions with Butter Scenes, a couple of requests came afterwards such as the ability to react to a certain note, the ability to filter notes or the ability to vote for certain notes.
The concept of continuity
Through qualitative research and interviews, we also uncovered how important it is for facilitators to have flexibility during the sessions and to tie certain activity results to a next one and so on. Most of the times, the results of one activity are intertwined with the themes of a next activity. This is where I proposed the concept of continuity: the ability to pre-populate a certain activity with the results of a former activity.
Conclusion
Along with other activities I designed such as the kan-ban activity, the voting mechanism or the free brainstorm, structured brainstorm held up nicely in workshops of more than 100 participants and facilitators gave feedback that this simplifies their work by not having to onboard each participant into a steeper learning curve platform so they could focus on what they do best, to facilitate.
Next steps
As next steps, the mobile experience was requested on the participant side for easier on-the-go access.
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