We’ve designed Lumière to flexibly handle a great many different types of activities. As you explore and familiarize yourself with the software, we expect that you’ll think of ways to use Lumière that haven’t even crossed our minds. (And when that happens, please let us know! We love learning about how people use Lumière, and at some point down the road, we’ll create a space where users can share their best practices with each other.)
In the meantime, there are a few use cases that we should point out, just to get you thinking about how to fit Lumière into your routine.
Who should interact with my videos?
Before diving into specific uses, we should note that Lumière isn’t strictly a research tool in the sense that most people construe “research.” While you’ll have traditional participants (target audiences, customers, etc.) involved in in a lot of your activities, you might also want to get feedback from within your (and/or a client’s) organization. For instance, film producers have told us that Lumière is especially useful for coordinating feedback among different members of their production teams, since feedback can be precisely linked to moments and specific elements in a video, and centralized/aggregated for review (this being especially useful when teams are dispersed across geographies and time zones). Producers making videos for clients (advertising and other communications, for instance) have found Lumière similarly useful for collecting client feedback on their creative iterations.
You might find yourself using Lumière primarily for research and evaluation, but we do encourage you to play a bit with the concept of “participants” and consider how you could benefit from the software when internally focused.
What can I do with Lumière?
Our colleagues at our parent company, Latitude Research, find Lumière especially helpful in the following main areas:
- Content pre-testing and optimization: Whether you’re talking about films, programs, trailers, promos, or ads, the core questions are the same: Do viewers like what I’ve produced? Are they engaging with it in ways that I hoped or intended? Is this video successful (however you define a successful outcome)? What’s obviously working, what’s not, and how can I make my video better?
- Longitudinal tracking: If you’re working in a serialized medium (television series and ad campaigns are great examples), it’s certainly important to know how each individual installment has performed, but it’s even more important to track series or campaign performance overall. If interest and engagement aren’t tracking where they should be, you should know early enough to take corrective action. On our very near-term “to-do” list: Building an interface that makes it easy for you to construct benchmarks and compile reports.
- Segmentation profiling: We deal with audience and consumer segmentations all the time, and even for us, it can be hard to wrap our heads around how, specifically, to engage target segments. Rather than creating your content with abstract segment personas in mind, you can actually test your videos among participants who belong to your segments (just upload a participant data set with each participant tagged with their segment affiliation) and directly compare Segment A, B, and C’s reactions. After all, if your core segments represent the best targets for your content (or product, as revealed through content), why not see how they’re actually engaging with your videos?
- Interface/user experience evaluation: It might not be immediately obvious, but video is an incredibly effective conduit for gathering feedback on Web and application interfaces. Traditional UX/usability work tends to be small-scale and qualitative (and often in-person), but Lumière allows you to explore UX and usability questions at scale and remotely, qualitatively and quantitatively. All you need to do is upload video walk-throughs of your websites and apps. (We’ve been doing an increasing amount of this work in our custom research business as media producers experiment with design and deployment of their content through Web and mobile devices.)
- Generative research/concept generation: Research isn’t always meant to diagnose, and you might want to experiment with letting your audiences and customers interact with your videos a bit differently. Instead of having them tell you what they like or don’t like about a given video, why not use that video to stimulate new ideas — for instance, around messaging, plot, character arcs, etc.? In addition to being enjoyable for participants, we’ve found that generative projects almost always uncover great (and often grounded) new ideas — and they can reveal latent audience and customer needs/wants that otherwise might not be expressed.
These are just a few ways that we tend to use Lumière, but the list above is by no means exhaustive. It also goes without saying that you should feel free to reach out if you’d like a little guidance on how to structure activities to accomplish the goals above.