Hyping up flow charts for Ignite.

Background

The product team behind Microsoft Visio was gearing up for a showcase at Microsoft Ignite. The new edition would bring the power of Visio to the web for the first time. Visio product owners were looking for a way to generate hype around this, and other new features.

The Challenge

The audience of the Ignite conference is intimately familiar with flowcharts. Raising eyebrows meant we couldn’t just show a flowchart and go home. The Visio team also had plans to launch a collaboration feature, but hadn’t finished building it prior to our project. We needed a way to bring these features to life for the audience without knowing what they would look like.

The Approach

We deconstructed the Visio UI to animate in 2D, and set the animation to upbeat music. Taking apart the UI allowed us to create eye catching patterns and to create dynamic movements that would have been difficult to achieve otherwise. The collaboration tool was depicted with stylized live action footage and UI elements composited onto device screens in post. This approach allowed us to showcase all product features, while retaining flexibility in case Visio’s UI changed during post production.