Piipl – the people involvement and innovation platform – is a Web 2.0 application for facilitating user-driven innovation, product or service improvement, change management, user research and similar processes that benefit from group interaction and sharing. Piipl helps companies, government agencies, and researchers involve users in capturing, organizing, and discussing their observations and insights using pictures, video, and text. It’s a powerful tool to help you gain insight into people’s experience with your product or service that can then be fed back into the development cycle.

Piipl provides a secure, closed site where a facilitator or “host” can set up activities around a topic or theme. They can then invite participants and ask them to submit their observations in the form of text, video, or photos. The host can then engage participants with this content using various activities such as tagging, prioritizing, and organized discussions.

We’ve taken a host-facilitated process flow and layered it on top of a familiar social networking environment, opening up new potential for scaling up your discovery processes and engaging your end users wherever they may be, via the web or their mobile phone.

For example, rather than just giving participants a journal and a camera, and hoping they come back with interesting observations, piipl lets you see the data as it arrives, in real-time, enabling a more dynamic workflow. If the information coming in doesn’t seem relevant, you can redirect participants or rephrase the activity to yield better results.

Piipl also allows participants to engage and collaborate with one another in ways that weren’t possible before, and they don’t need to be in the same room, the same city, or even the same time zone. Capturing behavior that occurs infrequently or privately is now easier giving you the potential to gain access to insights that would be more difficult to develop with other methods. Once you collect it, you never have to worry about server space or backup since even enormous amounts of data are held for you on our server. Your data is, of course, kept completely confidential.

Piipl is ideal for
• product design and innovation projects
• public sector service improvement
• cultural probes and user studies

Piipl helps answer questions like
• how do people use our product or service?
• how do people feel about our product or service?
• how can we improve our product or service?