Case study: Designing Meaningful Orientation Experiences for influencers to get endorsed
Disclaimer: This is a personal project that I got to help develop a company’s product, I did this project myself because I believe I can complete all this research process from start to finish in a structured and measurable manner.
Objective
My goals for this UX study were to:
- Critically analyze problems in an another existing app
- Back up my decisions and solutions with sound reasoning and data
- Communicate my thinking and design process
- Show, not just tell, my ability to do the above things
- Meet the charm of the destination and convince him to do a usability test for a period of 10 minutes with someone they have never met
Phase 1: take a look at the existing platforms
Before designing an app, I took the time to look at the existing influencer platforms. Previously I knew the Influence ID and Lemon for influencer applications from this project’s PIC, to help me compare the strengths and weaknesses between the two, so I included these two applications for analysis. In this case study I use qualitative research methods such as Competitive Analysis and User Testing. Then from the data I got, I tried to make an Affinity Diagram to get a pattern of what problems most users faced.
To find my findings and pick out the pain points I categorize each insight separately in an affinity map, I think it’s a great way to understand qualitative user research or customer feedback. User interviews, ethnography, and field studies often provide a large amount of rich qualitative data. Doing thematic analysis using affinity diagrams helps me find patterns, create themes, and find out what I learned from qualitative research by grouping data quickly and finding relationships between groups quickly and effectively.
To help me better relate to issues around a single user, I sketched out personas to represent the users I interviewed. I try to understand it better, the more I do it, the better results I get. I will understand my product more deeply and will be able to improve it better
Defining the problem
Overall, there were 3 main problems that users complained about, most of their interactions indicated that they had difficulty registering and were confused in understanding the project instructions. I narrowed these pain points down to:
1. The user is confused as to why he can’t register and states that they didn’t get any information explaining why they couldn’t register
2. Users did not find the current project list useful and stated they were most interested in the project’s brand and value information but did not go to the project details page
3. The user feels confused to understand the amount of information he has to do to run the project
The registration problem and the large amount of detailed project information are related to the first impression when using the app, so when it gives a bad experience to the users, they will remember it and there are some chances where they will leave a bad review and this review will be another barrier. for other new influencers to join the app.
Design Challenge
So, from the problems above, there are two design challenges that arise:
Influencers need to be guided when registering until they can find a suitable project for him to participate in in order to collaborate and earn additional income.
Below are specific user interactions that helped me identify my pain points, listed in a table I created to help measure the results of my design changes and I will only focus on addressing these three problems.
Fase 2: ideation
Before moving on to design solutions, I did some competitive analysis of the onboarding of the 2 apps (Influence ID, and Lemon for influencers( I wanted to know how those apps could handle new influencers and how it encouraged them to find the ideal project for them via the application.
Design Concept
In addition to the previous three issues, in making the onboarding experience useful to users, I discovered and divided the onboarding process into several stages:
- Landing page, where users open the app for the first time, so we need to demonstrate the advantages of the platform to convince them, and why they should trust the platform.
- Account Create, after the user is sure, the application will guide the user to create a new influencer account, usually this process takes a few days for the validation process, therefore to deal with it until it can be approved immediately, I encourage users to move to the next stage.
- Account Otorize, every user must meet the minimum requirements to register, this stage will help influencers to assess their follower profiles so that we can approve them immediately when they have been fulfilled.
- Project Discover by Project Type, this will guide users to find projects that match their content type, so they won’t participate blindly.
- Efective Project Detail, This is an important step for influencers to understand the brief of the project they are going to run.
- Commitment, endorsement is all about commitment, so at this stage, the app will encourage users to commit to their active projects to achieve their goals.
To clarify, this is a concept model of the design solution and user flow proposed when a new user logs into the app for the first time.
Proposed User Flows
This is the proposed user flow for the onboarding design concept:
In general, here are the solutions in the design that I have made, and in this article, I will only focus on addressing these three problems.
Phase 3: Visual Design
The next step is to design the visual aspect of the application. But, like other visual designers, before tackling UI design, I define the main color of the app first. For this application, I chose green as the main brand color because green represents trust and is liked by most people. Once the colors are defined, the next step is to define the design components, to ensure that the design remains consistent across screens. And finally, here’s the final result of this onboarding design:
Easy registration
After the user clicks the register button, the next step is to register to the platform and fill out the form to categorize the type of influencer and carry out an easy and clear authorization process
Content Category and easy-to-understand project details
After the registration is verified, the user can participate in the available projects according to the content type. Then users can easily read from beginning to end the brief provided by the brand in one page and it is easy to change reading information in each section. I also added fixed price information, when the influencer can participate and on which platform the influencer will post.
Phase 4: Solutions and impact
After my changes, the five prototype users had no more difficulties with the registration process and none expressed any confusion. Most of the users are even actively involved with the new filters and sort bar in the project list on their homepage and find it helpful, users also easily understand the entire project brief and don’t seem eager to participate. With these results, I can assume that their overall project registration and selection experience will be faster and more efficient.
Final Thoughts & Next Steps
In the end, in this article I can’t show the entire completion of the solution such as the withdrawal and commitment process because it is tied to the NDA by the company. It took 2 days to do usability tests and do competitive analysis, 1 day to design the concept, wireframe and to complete the visual design, and 1 day to document it. Everything I do alone without the help of a mentor or team.
Thank you for holding on to the end! If you want to talk about products or UX, contact me at f4khri.dz@gmail.com or LinkedIn (I’m also looking for exciting full-time design opportunities!)
