Buttsss: a case study

I’m excited to share with you the design process behind Buttsss, the most daring collection of round and beautiful butt illustrations in the universe. You can use these graphics on your pitch deck, product screens, marketing campaigns, business presentations, or motivational speeches.

The team approached this project with a deep understanding of the art and science of human anatomy. We gained insights by working closely with the world’s best butt connoisseurs and finding inspiration in how they create a world full of perfect bottoms.

Goal

Buttsss aims to bring a comprehensive collection of innovative glutes that enable creativity and collaboration across every dimension of a project.

The objective is to create a responsive butt system that allows rapid butt prototyping and wireframing. These graphics are so approachable that anyone in the organization can apply them; from designers in search of inspiration to CEOs looking to raise millions in venture capital. With advanced butt animation, mighty derrière design languages, and seamless buttocks collaboration, the user finds everything they need in one place.

It’s The Holy Grail of Butts.

Constraints

In the beginning, butts can seem uncomplicated and straightforward—some might even say dull and unpleasant. But, simplicity is the essence of pure elegance.

Restrictions boost creativity and are essential to achieving innovation. So, we used the apparent constraints of bottoms, with their limited number of buttcheeks, and artless round shapes, as our main advantage. They were a blank canvas that sparked our imagination.

Butts are the origin of all life.

Timeline

Time is an illusion.

The goal of Buttsss is to craft every brushstroke to answer the needs of every butt aficionado. That level of dedication and commitment takes time; that’s why the project took two full weekends to complete.

A project board was created to manage all the different related schemes and product management. We delivered this project in two sprints—a sprint is a time allocated for a particular phase of a project.

This technique allows us to satisfy the needs of the Buttsss project and continually develop more butts. The project gave preference to the shortest possible time for each effort—that way, our butts moved faster.

We were shaking things up.

Team

My role

You must be shapeless, formless, like butts. Become like Buttsss, my friend.

Have you ever seen movies where the credits for the writer, director, producer, casting, editing, and protagonist are the same person? That was my role in Buttsss.

I realized that to deliver my ultimate vision of Buttssss, I would have to take most (all) of the responsibilities. From conceptualization to iteration. From wireframing to prototyping. From user testing to React Butt Component implementation.

Simplicity is the art of maximizing unfinished work.

The team

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with butts.

Self-organized teams create the best experiences and are the most efficient. The team would take the time to reflect on how to become more productive and correct their behavior accordingly.

The team relied on constant face-to-face communication discussing the best way to make Buttsss a reality. Since I’m the only person working in this successful startup, I installed a state-of-the-art mirror next to my desk to regularly have deep conversations about posteriors with myself.

Head bent over. Raised up posterior.

The work

Research

To gather data and insights, the team had to rely on different UX research methods. This research allowed keeping product-development efforts on the right track—understanding we satisfied real user needs.

The initial research helped us understand what people require. The goal was to validate and discard assumptions before we even build the first butt. So, the research team had to go where the people were, to observe, interview, and listen to their butts. It was essential to see people interacting in context to learn their behaviors. That’s the only way to get to the bottomof things.

After that, the team conducted qualitative usability testing. People would describe their interactions with the graphics in real-time. All the learnings proved beneficial to the design and development of the final product.

There’s a fine line between research and procrastination.

Sketches

Greatness comes from small beginnings.

Hand sketching is a quick and low-cost design technique to gain insights early in the process. Sketching different shapes of posteriors allowed the team to discover the various routes that the product could take.

Move fast and break butts.

Wireframes

It’s essential to connect the dots.

We opted for low-fidelity prototyping in the initial stages of the design process to gain insight as early as possible. Wireframes can surface usability problems to consider before investing time in the development. We found that butts are so familiar and approachable in the user’s mind that they rarely cause any problem. Still, the exercise proved to be useful.

Mockups and prototypes

Once the user flow felt right, the team moved to mock up the skin of Buttsss. At this stage, we experimented with different technologies, then solidified our design decisions, and put every little pixel in its right place.

With butt prototypes, we tested how the round shapes looked in the interface at high fidelity. We shook, squeezed, and massaged every line of code and pixel until the butts were in the right position.

Final product

The landing page of the product was created using responsive design. This way, a single site supports many devices. We optimized the graphics by squeezing and pressing the animations. This compression guarantees better performance across devices to ensure usability and great user experience.

The result was a diverse collection of animations that portray bottoms in different scenarios to fit various user needs.

As part of our efforts to educate people about the use cases of Buttsss, we created a music video. This video shows the impact that this collection can have.

Outcomes

Results

Working on Buttsss proved to be a design challenge that has helped me grow as a creative person. Immersing myself into the butt experience has taught me the depths of Design Thinking. After taking a butt-centered approach, I was able to understand the people I was creating for and deliver better experiences for them.

Here are some numbers on the level of meaningful value that this project has had on humanity and the world.

• The Buttsss collection resulted in forty-four different butts and counting.
• User input in social media was the source of inspiration for several Buttsss.
• A form to gather Buttsss requests has started to gain some data, over 250 responses so far.

Looking ahead

We see a world in which Buttsss becomes the only form of communication—evolving culture and unifying nations. These round and beautiful graphics can express the subtleties of all human emotions and connect people in a meaningful way.

To get there, we have to solidify the Butt language. We imagine the foundation of books, schools, literature, institutions, based on buttocks.

What would I have done differently?

It’s always good to look back at your course and see all your missteps. That way, you can learn from your failures and grow. You have to take a deep breath and ask yourself:

• What went wrong, and why?
• What could I have done better?
• What did I learn?

Answering these questions will surface all the lessons from your journey. Every project has failures, and we should own them and wear them with pride.

That was not the case with this project, though. Buttsss is perfect in every way. So, I suppose I learned nothing.