handle. (an influencer’s office)
4-week sprint from design to development
Problem
Social Media Influencers do a ton of busywork. It’s a lot more than taking selfies and scanning their Instagram feeds. Here are just a few things that fit under their flexible job description:
- they have to post to multiple accounts — Instagram, facebook, twitter, and snapchat
- hundreds of direct messages to respond to
- analytics to keep tabs on and improve
- and countless things to plan and prepare in an attempt to create post-able content each and every day
Prompt
In a team of three designers and three developers build an app and get it in the app store within 30 days. The app should be a social media dashboard of sorts for social media influencers.
Goal
- To create a place where influencers can organize and plan their content.
- To simplify their posting process and in return give them more time offline.
- To help them feel validated in their business goals that are unique and often misunderstood.
WEEK UN
Research
S.W.O.T
We started by assessing the available apps in the market to better understand the opportunity and get some context before we started interviewing influencers who were using these platforms. We checked out their strengths, weaknesses, assessed our opportunities and related threats. We determined that our biggest opportunity was auto-posting to multiple platforms.
Interviews
I was very fortunate to have several old friends that I was able to interview, network, and ideate with. Most of the influencers we interviewed were between 20–30 years old. They had used an array of apps to help them plan content and pull analytics, but each app or service only would auto-post to one platform. So they found themselves jumping from app to app to review analytics and post new comments. We discovered the hole that we could fill would be to plan and auto-post content across multiple platforms.
Persona
After conducting quite a few interviews we created a persona who represented our recent findings. We named her Ari Madden. A 23-year-old lifestyle influencer who has recently moved to Los Angeles. Ari has been making macrame wall hangings for a few years now and is focused on transitioning her lifestyle followers into customers to create a sustainable passive income. This is her full-time gig and she is doing her best to treat it like a business even though it is difficult to validate among her friends and family.
Design Vision
- Simple Simple Simple — Don't include unnecessary information or features, give the user enough whitespace that the dashboard looks clean and organized
- Keep it professional — The app should validate our persona’s business, it should not be a soul-less excel sheet, but it should maintain an online office like feel
WEEK DEUX
User Journey
Before wireframing, we laid out our users goals and created a user journey of sorts. We dreamed big and set out all features that would potentially help our persona. Then we invited our developers in realizing that they would need to be seriously involved in this part of the process. Because they only had three weeks to build the app it was important they immediately cut features that would be impossible to build with the allotted time. They helped us create an MVP line. The features they didn’t think they could build in the allotted time were placed below our MVP line.
Wireframing
Starting early Monday morning, I began creating lo-fi mockups of the wireframes that I had begun sketching with our interviewees. With simplicity in mind, we created three features that would help our persona accomplish her goals:
- a calendar feature to plan content to auto post to multiple platforms
- an analytics dashboard that would be customizable and simple — spreading light on our persona’s multiple platforms
- a goal/inspiration page on which the user could create business goals and write notes or inspiration on how he/she could accomplish the goals
Testing
After completing the wireframes we prototyped them into Invision and visited with potential users who were similar to our persona. The reaction we got was really motivating. The users were excited and quick to point out the sections that they didn’t understand or see a need for. They were intrigued by the goal section we made, but several expressed the need for a way to track progress toward the goal.
The bulk of the users' feedback was in regards to the onboarding process. After logging into the app the user would be directed to the settings page where they could link social media accounts. However, users didn’t like popping up in the middle of the settings page. They felt lost and expressed that they would rather be walked through linking their account step by step.
WEEK TROIS
Style Guide
Solution
To address each of the goals of our user we did our best to
- design and build an app on which influencers and social media managers can organize and plan content to be auto-posted to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
- give them the opportunity to customize and pull analytics that they understand and that are relevant to them and their goals.
- create an online office of sorts. An office to house their business plan, goals, and tasks associated that they need to complete.
Final Prototype
My team and I tried our very best to keep the final design simple and minimalistic. We kept our dark blue for a professional feel but added a fun theme to the app’s welcome and loading screens.
Unexpected road bumps
This was my first project working with developers and I realized for the first time how hard their work was. My team and I did the best we could to work alongside them all the time. We worked from the same table, asked each other for advice, and figured things out together. However, because of our lack of experience and the social media platform’s complex APIs we had to cut a few features. Luckily our developers were very hardworking and great at compromising.
A list of features cut (in order):
- auto posting to Instagram
- analytics from all platforms
- the entire goal section
Learnings
It was both refreshing and exhausting coming in every day and working on a different aspect of the project. I learned more than I ever imagined I won't ever forget these three things:
- Involve your users in iterations, testing is beneficial in every single stage of the design process. Testing within your team is not enough because it is so easy to lose touch of your persona.
- C l e a r communication with developers is crucial. They should be involved in the design process and designers should check in with daily standups.
- Planning is everything. Creating little plans for specific stretches of time will boost effectivity and reduce stress.
