Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. | 2019
VidLyz: An Interactive Approach to Assist Novice Entrepreneurs in Making Persuasive Campaign Videos
Abstract
ing with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. 2573-0142/2019/11-ART43 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3359145 Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, No. CSCW, Article 43. Publication date: November 2019. 43:2 Sanorita Dey et al. While a video is crucial in convincing people to donate for crowdfunding campaigns, creating an appealing video is a challenging task for novice entrepreneurs [20]. Making a professional video involves several elements such as storyline, script, camera movements, editing, post-production editing, and so on. Most importantly, there are many audience persuasion factors, which are critical to optimize when making a campaign video persuasive to the audience. These factors are challenging to apply in videos without professional training in advertising and marketing. Unfortunately, novice entrepreneurs – while experts on their products – often do not even know what factors make a video generally persuasive, much less, what factors would make a video most persuasive for their specific audience. Past research identified many of these persuasion factors that can make campaign videos appealing to the audience [13]. Although these findings are valuable to researchers and advertising professionals, they do not help inexperienced entrepreneurs to effectively optimize their videos. The impact of these factors depends on campaign type, and often, their impacts are not intuitive. For instance, a complex representation of a fashion product is interpreted as evidence of fine craftsmanship by the general audience. Conversely, a video showing the complexity of a technology product, does not work favorably for the campaign. In this case, the audience assumes the product is difficult to use and it negatively impacts their overall impression of the campaign [13]. Without any true guidance or examples of best practices, the implication of such persuasion factors are hard for novice entrepreneurs to understand. Traditionally companies consult advertising agencies for creating persuasive product videos. However, the majority of the entrepreneurs on crowdfunding platforms are beginners and cannot afford such resources due to a limited budget. As an alternative, novice entrepreneurs attempt to learn using past campaign videos as examples, seek suggestions from peers and family members [20], and look for tips and strategies on the web [6, 37]. Many entrepreneurs depend on free counseling from film experts to compensate for their lack of experience in making videos [20]. Since Kickstarter does not allow creators to search through failed campaigns, novice entrepreneurs even go through third-party tools and blogs to compare and contrast ideas of their campaign videos. Unfortunately, this process can take three to six months of extensive work [20] and can still result in ineffective campaign videos. The goal of this paper is to understand whether and how we can develop assistive tools to help novice entrepreneurs learn how to apply persuasion factors to make effective campaign videos for their target donor audience. To this end, we focused on two main hypotheses based on the literature from HCI, and cognitive and learning science. First, given that novice entrepreneurs have difficulty predicting how combinations of persuasion factors will impact the success of their campaigns, we hypothesize that a tool that assists them in exploring effects of these factors on campaign outcomes through a process of structured interactivity will help them to a) learn the impact of these factors and, b) apply them in making their own videos more persuasive. Second, given that people learn new concepts better by thinking deeply about the concept and by generating materials by themselves, we hypothesize that a tool that guides novice entrepreneurs, in a step-by-step manner, to actively think about the critical aspects of persuasive campaign videos and to generate the planning materials of their videos by themselves will result in more appealing and creative plans for their videos. In this paper, we developed a functional prototype of VidLyz, an assistive web-based tool which consists of the following two modules: an interactive interface module that helps novice entrepreneurs learn the nuances of persuasion factors and enables them to make a comprehensive plan for their campaign video with the help of positive and negative example videos, interpretable explanations and measurement scales of persuasion factors, crowd-sourced feedback, and prediction models towards the success of the campaign (H1). From our second hypothesis, we designed another Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, No. CSCW, Article 43. Publication date: November 2019. VidLyz: An Interactive Approach to Assist Novice Entrepreneurs in Making Persuasive Campaign Videos 43:3 module, called the guided planning module, that guides novice entrepreneurs to actively think of the campaign video from the perspective of their own target audience and specific product category (H2). To evaluate the effectiveness of the VidLyz tool, we conducted an in-lab user study with 45 participants and interviewed five previous campaign creators with different backgrounds and experiences. The primary objective of our evaluation was the following: 1) whether VidLyz can assist in learning of the implication of persuasion factors and 2) whether this learning can help them make better plans for their campaign videos. To this end, we created two different versions of our VidLyz tool: 1) a non-interactive version (a simple version without any interactive properties or guided active thinking) and 2) a comprehensive version (highlighting the interactive features and incorporating the guided planning module). We also recruited participants in the control group, which included no tool but a list of example campaign videos categorized based on the final outcome (success/failure) of their corresponding campaigns. We randomly assigned each version of the VidLyz tool to 15 different participants and asked them to explore the tool to understand how persuasion factors can impact the effectiveness of campaign videos for prospective donors. In the end, all participants had to make their own plans for a campaign video of their pre-assigned product using a storyboard (a pre-production planning tool widely used by advertising agencies and film makers to make low-fidelity, easily customizable plans for videos). Results show that the comprehensive version of the VidLyz tool helped novice users gain a deeper understanding of the relative importance of the persuasion factors. The combination of the interactive interface and the guided planning module helped participants create coherent and persuasive storyboards for their proposed campaign videos. Overall, their storyboards were suitable for their target audience, which is a key element for an effective campaign video. A follow-up user study showed that crowd workers found the storyboards of the comprehensive group to be persuasive. Finally, semi-structured interviews with participants and five prior and one future campaign owners informed us of the aspects of the VidLyz tool that can be improved in the future to better assist novice entrepreneurs in making their campaign videos persuasive.