My Role
I led product design on this project - I built prototypes, tested with over 30 clients, and produced high-fidelity designs for both development and marketing purposes. I worked closely with a product manager, product marketing manager and a team of 5 engineers.
The Challenge
Curalate first launched as a social analytics tool in 2012. Throughout the years, our product offering grew beyond social as the business focused more effort on ecommerce solutions. As a result, our social tools had not been evaluated for some time. Competitors were rapidly catching up and even exceeding our offerings. With this launch, it was important that we regained the support of our initial user base.
With a three month timeframe, my team was tasked with revamping our Instagram offering, code name project #WINstagram. Our goal for this project was to improve core workflows for Social Media Managers and become the gold standard once again. We had a tight 3-month timeline as the company hoped that this reboot would impact contract renewals and lead to potential new businesses to close out 2017.
Initial Research
With a short timeframe, we didn’t have the luxury of conducting in-depth discovery research. As a proxy, we spoke with customer success managers and scoured through feedback tickets to get an initial understanding of our users, their needs and workflows.
The primary users of Curalate's social analytic tools are Social Media Managers or other members of a social team. Social Media Managers are responsible for managing a brands' social media networks with the goal of increasing top-of-funnel metrics (brand awareness, engagement, and audience count). Below is a snapshot of their core workflow:
With a better understanding of our user base and their workflow, my product manager and I worked together to compile use cases and high-level requirements. This served as the building block for further product documentation that was shared with the executive team.
Validating Direction
Early brainstorm sessions with the team led to an initial concept that would soon become the #Winstagram Dashboard. The vision was to create a “one-stop shop” dashboard that catered to our social media managers core workflows. Previously, our social analytic pages were scattered across the platform and it was hard for users to get a solid understanding of overall analytics.
I quickly mocked up a proof of concept and we went to gather feedback with clients. During this phase of testing, we chatted with 9 clients. Some early learnings are:
1. We were going in the right direction with a “One-stop shop” - users felt the previous workflows was very clunky and loved being able to pull up a quick overview.
2. Reporting needed to be more flexible and allow clients to investigate peaks and lows
3. Clients wanted more than just the ability to schedule - they also wanted to plan and manage content
Design Details & Iteration
Once we determined a solid direction, it was time to iterate and get down to the details. We continued to test with clients every week - overall we tested with nearly 20 clients during this phase. It was great to have such frequent feedback sessions as we were able to get quick validation on open questions.
Below are deep dives into design iterations and solutions for various aspects of the dashboard:
End-to-end Scheduling flow
A key consideration for this new dashboard was the scheduling component. A scheduler allows users to schedule content (posts, gallery posts, and stories) to Instagram. Our legacy scheduler was incredibly hard to use and resulted in many new client questions and support tickets. From our first phase of testing, we knew that we also needed to support the ability to plan, manage, and schedule content. With this in mind, I explored a wide array of concepts to support the end-to-end scheduling workflow.
After sharing with the team, I then prototyped the workflows and went to gather feedback from users. During user testing, we found that users strongly preferred designs that incorporated a shareable content calendar and preview of the brand’s Instagram feed. Post release, we received feedback from several clients that the new scheduler helped streamline their workflow and even replaced other tools. The scheduler is now the most highly viewed page on the platform.
Designing Reporting Patterns
When designing this dashboard, I strived to stay cohesive with our style guide and pattern library. However, our previous design system lacked patterns geared towards reporting and data analysis. Below is a look at a few new pattern additions - we are continuing to add to our metric components to ensure we were building reusable components for this and future projects.
Results
About a month after launch, the new dashboard impacted nearly $650K in ARR. Impact was calculated by if a client stated the new dashboard as a key factor during renewal or sales process. Although the main impact was on existing clients, we also influenced a healthy chunk of new business as well.
For me, the most rewarding results were qualitative feedback. Post-launch, several clients shared great feedback about the ease of use and look & feel.
Overall, I was really proud of my team for taking a user-centered approach towards this reboot. I truly believe the success of this project was due to our empathy towards our users and drive to listen hard and iterate until we got it right. Due to the tight timeline, a lot of features had to be cut for initial release but stay tuned for some awesome fast follows!