LEMON's Content Approval Feature: Designing A New Feature for An Influencer Marketing Platform.

Project Overview

LEMON is an influencer marketing platform that lets you create marketing campaigns and find & work with social media influencers easily. LEMON is available as a paid platform for small and growing businesses, and a more powerful version of the platform is used as a tool for our company’s internal Community Development team in managing campaigns from big clients that we handle ourselves. 

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In this project, we design from the perspective of LEMON as the company’s internal tool for managing client campaigns.

Goal

‍The main goal of this project was to design a feature that would help reduce the operational time and cost spent on communicating & coordinating with influencers for a campaign. We initially aimed to design an in-app chat feature, but later changed direction after research shows different underlying problems.

Target Users

Our internal Community Development Team that handles clients' influencer marketing campaign.

My Role

I led this project as a UI/UX designer, together with a multidisciplinary team of developers, community manager, and one other UI/UX designer intern.

Timeline

October - December 2020

Process Summary

Most work is protected under NDA. I have excluded confidential information and intentionally didn't elaborate on some parts of the project. If you want to know more about my approach for this project, feel free to reach out to me.

The Problem

When handling a promotional campaign for a client, a campaign PIC needs to communicate constantly with more than 30 influencers to ensure the quality of the content they post to social media. 

Since the communication was done in a third-party messaging app at the time, the team proposed an idea of an in-app chat to help the experience go smoother, as it will reduce our campaign PIC's tasks of labeling contacts, creating groups, etc. 

As a start, to find out what process took the most time and effort in the communication process, I conducted an interview with 4 campaign PICs from our company. 

From the interview, I learned that a PIC only use the chat groups for 3 things

• sharing reminders or deadlines 
• Sharing announcements or campaign updates, and
• answering questions regarding campaign

Surprisingly, those things mentioned aren't happening that much once a campaign has started running. 

In fact, about 70% of the communication happening is done for checking and approving influencers' content drafts.

In a promotional campaign, influencers have to send the content (photos, videos, caption, etc.) they plan to share—called drafts—before posting it on their social media. This process, which was done in personal chat rooms, was inefficient for several reasons:

• Campaign PIC and influencers have to keep sending files and revisions back and forth, taking up a lot of device storage for the campaign PIC.
• After approval, influencers need to upload their final drafts to a cloud drive again so that our campaign PIC can share it to the client to see. 
• If a campaign PIC is temporarily replaced (because they're sick, etc.), it's hard to pick up the job quickly since the new PIC would have to contact the influencers again.
• When it's time to post, influencers tend to ask again which draft is approved to be reassured.

All those processes are done one by one, as it is done within a personal chat. With one campaign having more than 30 influencers and one PIC usually handling 3 to 4 campaigns at a time, I can easily see why they can quickly get overwhelmed.

The Solution

Due to NDA, I cannot elaborate on the details of how the feature works in this section.

We group all the observations from the interviews using an affinity diagram to be able to start pulling insights and brainstorm ideas. Once this is done, we can easily see how an in-app chat wouldn't solve the problem, but rather just moving the problem to another platform. 

The content draft approval process by nature doesn't fit the chats model. The team then came up with the idea of a draft approval system. I started the design by creating a concept model for the idea, while continuously checking with the team to ensure the model covers the main problems.

Once the concept model is fixed, we created the user flows that later would be translated into wireflows to better communicate the idea to the developers and the rest of the team.

We iterate on several different alternatives in this phase to be able to find a flow that would be easiest and most suitable for both the campaign PIC and the influencers.

After the wireflows were fixed, I turned them into high-fidelity design and interactive prototype to be used in usability tests later. 

We were in the middle of transitioning to a new design system, so I created both alternatives using the old UI style and the new UI style for the developers to be able to start building at any point.

After creating a high-fidelity prototype, I conduct usability testing with 4 campaign PICs from our Community Development Team. 

From the test, I learned to major issues with the current design:

• The copy of the drafts' statuses wasn't clear enough, slowing down the checking & approval process.
• Most of the time, influencers submit 2 to 4 options of a draft at once, and there are cases where more than one option is approved to be posted as a carousel post. This scenario wasn’t covered yet in the first version of the feature.

After the usability test, I iterate the status copy by providing several copy options and ask the campaign PICs what they think each of the copy means. Then, I picked the most suitable copies and iterated the designs again to also cover the flow of approving more than one draft from an influencer.

Because I couldn’t conduct a usability test with the influencers, I also asked the Community Development Team (some of them are also influencers!) to review the influencer’s screens to spot problems that might arise. 

To reduce the frequency of influencers asking again which content to post after approval, we created an option to post the approved content directly to Instagram from the influencer’s app.

However, due to some constraints from the development side, we adjusted this feature to only provide downloadable & copyable content. 

After a final presentation with the Community Development and Business team, the designs are ready to be handed-off for development of the first MVP version.

‍The Outcome

We receive positive feedback from the campaign PICs for the early prototype, and the beta version of the feature is currently being tested for bugs and issues. The first version of the complete feature is scheduled to be released internally for the Community Development Team within the first quarter of 2021, and we'll be able to measure the impact by then.

Reflection

It's very natural to already have something in mind when starting a project. But, never go with your first idea before talking to the users. I learned from this project that it is essential to always start with a clear mind when asking users about the problem, and you might surprise yourself with how much it can change the direction of what you're working on. In this project, if I hadn't talked with our campaign PICs, we would've continued working on the in-app chat first, not knowing that a content approval feature was what's more needed. 

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If I had more time and resources for this project, what I would do differently is I would also talk with the influencers to understand their perspective on this process since two main users take part in this process and it would help me create a better experience if I had insights from the influencers’ point of view as well.

I’d also try to zoom out and challenge not only our solution ideas but the problem framing itself. I’d look back on the outcome that we want to achieve and ask questions such as “What other opportunities do we have to achieve that?”; “How do the metrics relate to our outcome goal?”; “Which aspect of a campaign process is most important? Is It the collaboration with the client, or something else?”; “How can we prioritize it?”. That way, we’d be able to prioritize and build the most crucial features better.   

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As half of the design team in this project, I was involved in the process from end to end and learned a lot in making decisions along the way. And a bonus apart from learning a lot: this project led me to receive the Staff of the Quarter award (yeay!)🎉🎉.