Showcase Storyful’s
UCG archives
Storyful’s Inspire is a project very close to my heart, as I was the lead and sole designer on it! My role on this project included: leading UX research, defining the product vision, branding, full product user experience and interface design, onboarding, illustration, copywriting and go-to-marketing material. Small budgets require you to be resourceful, smart and scrappy.
The Problem
People have grown tired of overly branded content, and user generated content is king. Brands are finding it increasingly different to regularly connect and engage with their customers. Brands have a tradition of a ‘campaign first’ approach; this dated advertising approach is ‘inauthentic’ and detached from how people are consuming content today. Marketers have no simple way to find and understand the trends their target audience are interested in.
To help brands uncover and understand trends relevant to their target audience, backed up with data so they can be the first to act with confidence on the next big opportunity.
My Process
Define
I worked on this project from conception to launch so it is hard to simply summarize my involvement. To best explain my role and process I am going to dig into our MVP.
As this project was completely new, a good bit of foundational research was needed. This required myself and the Head of Product to visit several agencies in Ireland and New York to investigate the problem and assess if there was an opportunity. With our interviews we uncovered that there was no easy way for agency/brand marketers to get a grasp on daily trends. One agency had an intern come to the office one hour before anyone else to read all the papers and write up a summary email to be sent out to all marketing staff. A few agencies would check Twitter trends, Google News and Facebook in the morning to stay up to date. One agency employee said he would ring Google and ask for an update on the daily trends! There was no clear pattern emerging.
Develop
Our key takeaways
To get a grasp of trends, marketers monitor several different platforms throughout the day.
The trends are not tailored to their target audience.
There was no data behind the trends making it difficult to take confident action.
Once we identified the agencies’ goals and pain points, and assessed opportunities in the marketplace, we defined an MVP: a simple trend and events feed. One place to view and understandthe trends your target audience are interested in, clearly backed up with data!
Design
As Storyful was a start up with little funding for extensive research, we wanted to get something up and running fast so we could put it in front of people and see if they gained value from it. I created rough wireframes and an Invision prototype, performing scrappy usability tests internally.
Once we were happy with the user flow of the feed, I created high fidelity mocks. Within two weeks we had our MVP, Myself and two other developers created a trend and calendar feed. To start, the trends feed wasn’t that smart. It scraped trends from Twitter, Facebook, reddit, Google News and Youtube. However, it solved our first customer problem and provided us with something solid we could put in front of people in order to get feedback, to test and iterate!
