The secret sauce behind Social Pilot’s disruptive growth
SocialPilot is one of the leading all-in-one tool, that enables user to create, publish, manage and monitor analytics of their social media content across multiple platforms and profiles from a single place. SocialPilot approached us shortly after their product launch for a UI makeover.
Scope
After evaluating their design, we observed that the current product not only needed work on UI but also on their UX. Therefore, we engaged in revamping the Web App to make the most used features accessible.
Highlights
- UI overhaul of the Web App.
- Re-design create post, so that it is accessible to user anytime. It also had to be scalable so that the design supports addition of newer platforms in future.
- User-centric design of the calendar feature, which has become an indispensable part of a creator and manager’s routine and is used heavily to plan content strategy and post tracking.
- Designed analytics page and PDFs which can be shared with the clients to keep track of the impact posts are creating for their businesses.
Create post
Re-designed the heart of the product to make it accessible and future-ready.
Create post module was promoted as one of the main features of the platform. Yet it was hidden away inside the navigation menus reducing its accessibility and discoverability on the platform. The design of the module itself was not scalable to add more social media platforms in the future. This was critical to fix because it was in conflict with the product goal of creating a single platform for all social media needs.
Moreover, the module would open in a new page with no way to save or minimize the process of content creation hindering the flexibility a user would need to pause and resume work. As a result of this, the user was forced to complete the creation process in one go or totally abandon it and restart the process again later on. Lastly, the interface did not provide any visuals of how the posts would actually appear on the chosen platforms once they are posted. The users constantly went back and forth between the platform and SocialPilot to edit and fix the posts — basically shooting in the dark and guess working which affected the portrayal of their brand.
All these problems were necessary to address and we did that from both UX and UI perspectives.
Addressing accessibility
Since create post module was one of the important features of the platform, we brought it up on the navigation bar so that it was always a click away for the users to access it. We also kept the module in its original menu on the side navigation, so that the existing users could find it as they were habituated to find it there.
Overall redesign — Modal solution
From a user experience point of view, we decided to re-design create post feature to open in a modal, instead of restricting it to opening in a new page. This had a couple of advantages:
- User could pause the post-creation process by minimising the modal and quickly resume by maximising it. Think of composing an email in Gmail. This allows users to multitask at ease on the platform.
- Having create post as a modal also provided an opportunity to access it inside other modules on the platform. For instance, a user could click on empty slot on the calendar and open the modal to create a new post right there — without having to navigate away from the screen.
- The design also included the modal to go full screen so that the users could comfortably view all their creations.
- A preview panel was also added to this modal, so that the users could visualize how their creations would appear once they are posted !
Making the solution future-ready
The product goal of SocialPilot is to let users post and manage their content across all platforms from a single place. However, the initial designs of create post module weren’t built to help users customise their content as per the different platforms. We took care of this from user interface (UI) perspective by introducing platform tabs in the design.
Through this, the user could create generic content in the draft tab and then optimise the content on respective platform tabs for the same.
The revamped design of create post was appreciated by the users for its ease of use and accessibility on single click.
Calendar
Leveraging the user’s ability to combine knowledge in the head with the knowledge in the world to create intuitive composing, scheduling, and managing post experience.
We kept in mind associations a user commonly has with printed calendars to build this feature in SocialPilot. Looking at a calendar, one gets an overall sense of time to plan and schedule their days/events. Likewise, a social media manager would greatly benefit if they had access to a digital calendar which could help them plan and schedule content posting. SocialPilot decided to build just that.
As designers, we understood the wide range of interactive capabilities a digital calendar could provide.
We’ll dive into some of them here:
Viewing options
With user interface elements like tab switching, we could let the users switch calendar views between a day, week or month with a single click. This gave users opportunity to view and schedule their content strategy at micro as well as macro levels.
We also introduced a listing format of the posts in the day view, so that user could see in a glance all details of their social media post, along with the the accounts where they were being posted.
Digging deeper into the content
Progressive disclosers is a great technique for drill downs and we utilised this function in the calendar by expanding the post tiles — so that the users could view and also edit them without having to navigate to any other screen.
On click post creation
Just as we mark dates in a calendar we also let product users click on an empty space to schedule a post there. The fruits of designing create post as a modal can be seen here as the entire post creation and scheduling would be exactly the same.
Drag and drop interactions
One thing you can’t do in a physical calendar is re-position a marked event on a date somewhere else without having to erase and re-write. But this was easily possible in a digital calendar where the users could re-position their posts within the same day, week, month, etc.. by a simple function of drag and drop.
With the main functionalities covered, the calendar feature in SocialPilot was designed to be scalable and intuitive to use.
Analytics: Detail reports — delivered!
What good is a social media tool if it can’t provide insights into how its content is performing? Hence the inclusion of analytics and reports became an important feature in SocialPilot — specially for the brand heads, marketing folks and budget allocators of the company.
There was an obvious problem of abundance here. With a large number of data points to choose from, it was absolutely necessary to structure data sets in logical groupings, so that we can establish a hierarchy of displaying information which upon choice can be further drilled down.
The report generation was first split into the respective platforms the account belonged to. This automatically also grouped parameters associated with that platform. Next, we spoke to the stakeholders and figured out the key data sets a user would want to see and these were consciously accommodated in the first fold. The secondary and tertiary data sets followed in the second fold and the visual space and treatment was also applied accordingly. This helped generate a comprehensive report, where important data sets jumped out to the user and information which good to know but not always necessary to consume were subdued yet always accessible.
Talking about report sharing, these analytics could be generated for any period of time and downloaded in a PDF format to share. These could also be scheduled to be sent to recipients on the date and time of their choice — thus maintaining transparency and prompt decision-making for their content strategy and promotion.
When SocialPilot approached us, they only felt that their UI had to be overhauled to keep up with competition. But our involvement in the project also identified and elevated the experience of other features like dashboard, social inbox, and content library. We also worked on simplifying the user flow of connecting various social media accounts to the SocialPilot platform resulting in faster product adoption. Our detailed design system made the platform experience consistent and greatly contributed in improving the brand’s credibility.
All of these combined became a driving force to ultimately bring in more revenue.
