We recently completed an R&D project with Reduct — a video editing platform, to explore how we might use it as a research analysis tool. We did some experiments with our research partners for a global project and consulted the Head of Design at Reduct to discuss some of the feedback we gathered in the process. Overall we are excited about Reduct’s Videoboard as an all-in-one place for research analysis and are keen to continue trying it out. Below are some of our main observations:
Before these experiments, we had already used Reduct to make quick video reels for a few projects. We were recently introduced to a new feature: the Videoboard. It merges online whiteboards with video editing. Alongside the already powerful features for highlighting and tagging, Videoboards make it possible to analyse video content visually. So this is where we focused our experiments.
Visual and dynamic analysis
We uploaded video recordings of a collection of 1-to-1 remote interviews. We then highlighted the key takeaways from each interview and gave them tags based on our research questions. So far, this resembles a traditional analysis process. Normally we would then go back to see what stories we manage to pull out under each tag, which usually ends up with a linear storytelling format. But with Videoboard, we could give the analysis another dimension and make it much more visual and dynamic.
For this study, we looked at user journeys and were able to plot our highlighted video clips on a visual journey framework by applying tags such as awareness, registration, expectation, barriers, etc. By dragging and dropping tags into the video, the system automatically pulls video highlights under this tag to the board, ready for clustering.
We did this experiment with a few international research partners, and we worked with 3 Videoboards – one for each location. One of our partners made one journey for each participant, while the other created a few clusters with clips from different interviews. This worked all fine, though meanwhile we noticed that the boards slowed down considerably when flooded with hundreds of video clips and notes.
What Videoboard offers as a next step is a pretty cool function: you can select a few clips on the board, and then generate a reel in one click. Interestingly, the board will also take the Post-it notes and make them into title slides between the video clips in the reel. This can speed up the process of creating reels for each insight cluster, however, we didn’t get to use this feature fully, for reasons we will explain later.
Here are a few things we learnt about using the Reduct Videoboards:
Pro’s
It’s great for researchers who enjoy visual clustering. We have used a few other tools in the past, such as Airtable and Dovetail, and found the primarily text-based analysis process to be somehow limiting. We have used Miro with our international partners since then, but putting video into Miro is a lot more work and we usually don’t have the luxury of time. Videoboards in Reduct solved that problem beautifully, allowing us to bring video clips to a visual board seamlessly.
We can mix video clips and post-it notes on the Videoboard. So we can create clusters and make notes about what each cluster means. We can work on insights (what we write in the notes) alongside the evidence (quotes from the videos) in one place. There is no going back and forth between evidence and insights in different tools, thus potentially saving time and reducing mistakes.
Generating reels to illustrate insights becomes easy once the clusters are ready. This also works if we need to generate several reels for one insight within one Videoboard.
Con’s
The Videoboard is not as powerful as other dedicated online whiteboard platforms such as Miro or Mural. Currently, the choices for customising Post-it notes and text are still limited, making it difficult to create a visual hierarchy for big projects loaded with video clips. The board can be visually crowded and overwhelming. If we are to use Videoboard for analysis again, we would be more selective about what clips are to be placed on the board to avoid overwhelming ourselves. (Note: When we spoke about this with the Reduct’s design team, they were happy to provide a few extra choices of Post-it note colours, but also explained that they do not intend to develop a fully dedicated online whiteboard, which is fair enough, as they primarily focus on video editing.)
It was not easy to combine multiple Videoboards into one. As explained before, we made one board for each location and hoped to bring all 3 boards together for a global synthesis. However, copying and pasting across different boards was not easy, so we didn’t carry through with that plan. Unfortunately, we ended up moving to a Miro board for the global synthesis and thus didn’t use the function of generating the final reels from the Videoboards. However, for a project that wouldn’t involve multiple Videoboards, we can imagine doing the analysis from start to finish on one Videoboard. That will be our next experiment with a smaller project.
The non-English language function of Reduct is still limited, and English seems to be the easiest to work with. For this project, we worked with videos with a soundtrack from an English interpreter, so all the clips are in English and that worked fine. But managing videos in different languages will be a challenge. Currently, the auto-transcription function works best with English and with languages with a big sample base (e.g. Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese). Reduct’s design team promised that they are working on some new AI translation features, so we will sit tight for any updates in this aspect.
Conclusion
We are pretty excited about Reduct’s Videoboard as an all-in-one place for research analysis, especially when the work involves video recordings in English. For anyone who enjoys visual clustering on Miro boards, we’d suggest you try it out. At STBY, we see a lot of potential in this tool and will apply it to more projects now we know the pros & cons.
Paulien Kreutzer & Qin Han