Making User Generated Content More Accessible to Businesses
Context
Engajify is a web application that helps businesses harness the power of user generated content. It provides a platform for businesses to curate, manage and respond to user-generated content.
My Role
I joined Engajify as a sole product design lead in the company, collaborating closely with product managers, engineers and stakeholders to develop the emerging user generated content startup. Over the course of 8 months, I designed the web app from the ground up while continuously iterating on the landing page, campaign builder and submissions management system, amongst various other pages.
Getting more user generated content (UGC) can be a valuable strategy for businesses to enhance their online presence and engage with their audience. However, there are several challenges they might encounter in this endeavor. Aside from the basic competitive research and some qualitative/quantitative data, I conducted interviews with 15 business and marketing professionals.
From the interview sessions with users, we extracted some constructive human insights. Below are some of the pain points they mentioned.
Encouraging users to create content can be challenging, requiring incentives like contests or discounts.
UGC needs careful moderation to filter out negativity and spam. Not all UGC is high quality or on-brand, necessitating curation
Handling the growing volume of UGC can be overwhelming for businesses
Users
Before we started designing, we deep dive into existing behavioral and purchase data of our users to understand them better. We focused on identifying what is the job that our customers hire our product for.
We defined 3 user archetypes, and mapped them to their respective jobs-to-be-done.
Small Business Owner Victoria
Victoria is the business owner of a bakery. She wants to uplift her social media presence through the power of authentic user generated content.
Goals
She's looking for cost-effective ways to market her business and engage with her local community.
Pain Points
Limited budget and resources make it challenging for Victoria to create professional-looking marketing materials. She needs a simple solution to collect and display user-generated content on her website and social media platforms.
Marketing Manager Melanie
Melanie works as a marketing manager for a mid-sized e-commerce company. She is responsible for creating engaging marketing campaigns and increasing brand visibility.
Goals
Melanie wants to leverage user-generated content to enhance the company's online presence and drive more sales.
Pain Points
She struggles to find authentic user-generated content that aligns with the brand's image. Additionally, managing and curating user-generated content across multiple channels is time-consuming.
Social Media Manager Sarah
Sarah works as a social media manager for a fashion brand. She's responsible for maintaining the brand's social media presence, engaging with followers, and increasing follower growth.
Goals
Sarah aims to create a vibrant online community around the brand and foster authentic connections with followers. She wants to leverage user-generated content to showcase the brand's products in real-life scenarios.
Pain Points
Sarah finds it difficult to consistently source high-quality user-generated content that fits the brand's aesthetic. She needs tools to streamline the process of discovering, and obtaining rights to content.
Ishikawa (fish bone) analysis
I didn’t want to just address the symptoms but wanted to get at the root cause of the problem. Often times, it happens that a problem has many layers to it. The problem is shown as the fish’s head on the right. The major categories or causes of the problem are the ribs of the fish. The fishbone diagram helped reveal bottle necks to the platform becoming a crowd favorite UGC platform.
How might we make it easier for businesses to manage,
respond to and curate UGC content?
Goals
User Growth and Retention
- Implement strategies to increase user engagement, loyalty, and retention rates.
- Continuously analyze user feedback and behavior to enhance the platform's value proposition and user experience.
- Streamline user workflows, navigation paths, and interaction patterns to facilitate seamless and intuitive user experiences.
Content Quality and Diversity
- Implement robust content moderation mechanisms to maintain high-quality content standards.
- Promote diversity in content types, formats, and topics to cater to a broad range of interests and preferences.
- Facilitate easy discovery of relevant and engaging content through effective categorization and recommendation systems.
User Experience
- Ensure a seamless and intuitive user interface across different devices and platforms.
- Streamline the content submission process to encourage user participation and minimize friction.
- Optimize loading times and performance to enhance user satisfaction and retention.
Support Business Objectives
- Collaborate closely with product managers, developers, and stakeholders to align UI/UX design efforts with business goals and priorities.
- Contribute to product strategy discussions and roadmap planning by providing insights and recommendations based on user-centered design principles.
- Balance user needs and business requirements to deliver solutions that optimize both user experience and business outcomes.
Process
We conducted design sprints to facilitate collaboration cross-departments. Product Manager, Engineers and Creatives contributed their fresh ideas in this sprint. The purpose of these sprints is to align everyone on the same goal - To improve our consumer experience by solving our user's problems today.
User flows
Final Designs
Here’s a detailed walkthrough of the platform
Customizable no-code landing page for creators to post content
One of the features was a customizable landing page where the audience can get information about the rewards and can post their UGCs. I used the example of the Barbie movie to demonstrate how a page can look like once it's been customized. The panel on the side gives ample customization options; the user can customize the landing page section by section, adding their own images, text and background colors. For those who don’t want to spend too much time customizing, there’s the global settings option. The top navigation bar has two buttons: preview and publish. This allows users to preview or publish their landing page.
Campaign page
The Campaigns Page is for exploring and managing all ongoing, upcoming, and past campaigns for UGC.
The Form
When first creating a campaign, users are directed to a form. Long forms are a drag for the user, luckily is possible to achieve simplicity without removing content from your form. By breaking down complex tasks and grouping related information together, I was able to create a more user-friendly experience.
Campaigns Page for First Time Users
It can be confusing to know the user journey for first time users. We added a cute icons explaining the journey to simplify the process for them.
Submissions
Users can view submissions and accept or reject them.
Giving Rewards
Users can give rewards after accepting a submission
Landing Page for Engajify
We wanted Engajify’s landing page to be colorful; to voice Engajify's fun ethos of unleashing the power of community-created content. I used light pastels to emphasize the playful nature of the web app. I broke the page down into several sections that showcased what the app was about.
Lucid Design System
Lucid is a scalable design system that saves time, reduces technical debt over time. It solves the problem of inconsistent components and user experience. Everything in the website is made up of these modular components—this gives a unified, consistent, robust UI.
The design system is never final. It evolves as we go along.
Outcome and Learnings
Despite the close collaboration between design, development and the client, there might have been more straightforward conversations and critical feedback on earlier stages when defining the MVP.
Optimizing the submissions management page was one of the biggest wins of 2023 and directly led to increasing the conversions. I learned that the page is both informative and actionable, it inspires confidence in users. "Simplicity is a key" rule works for every aspect here: from content and layout to benefit-driven language.
At the end of the day, creating an app that stimulates small businesses to harness the power of user generated content has been the highest reward of all. As well as seeing people use UGC to boost social engagement and promote their products has been nothing but inspiring. Today, this platform has over 10k users.
