RESEARCH
Reviewing Personas
We started by understanding how existing partners utilize our current platform by reviewing existing data collected through surveys and interviews from prior research. Three main personas had been created: Novice, Intermediate, and Expert. These personas primarily consist of affiliates and strategic business partners.
Let's get to know them.
Who our partners and what do they need?
Novice
NEEDS
Accept invites from brands so I can start earning money ASAP
Review brands in Marketplace so that I can see if they're a good fit to apply and foresee monetization
Monitor how I'm doing weekly (peformance, earnings, etc.)
Intermediate
NEEDS
Visit Dashboard so I can view my snapshot, review invites, and create links with SubID's
Review brands in Marketplace so that I can see their website, payout, and funding status
Evaluate small-mid brands to see whether they are of quality
Expert
NEEDS
Easily see view CPA with brands to get the best payout
Ensure detailed promotional and payout of the brand meets all the necessary criteria for the business
Maintain strong strategic relationships with brands across all platforms joined to
FRUSTRATIONS
Limited time to deep dive into platforms since she's using so many, currently a side hustle
Struggles to partner with the right brands due to being in a niche market
FRUSTRATIONS
Finding more relevant brands to add to existing strong partnerships can be difficult and confusing
Payment schedules can be confusing as he's joined to many brands in & out of the platform
FRUSTRATIONS
Not enough time to sift through invites from multiple brands, time-consuming and annoying
Difficult to get contact information for the main person managing programs
Main Objectives
Create a simple experience where partners can discover and learn more about brand's they want to work with.
Organize detailed brand information for users to easily learn more about potential partnerships.
Develop an overall summary for users to view and manage their relationships and performance.
DEFINITION & SYNTHESIS
The Existing Experience
After reviewing our personas, it was important to look over the existing experience and pinpoint features we might want to improve. At first glance, this gives us a starting point of issues we can tackle throughout the process.
- Update styling and condense the categories with the ability to search within filters
- Make navigation more intuitive, possibly rearrange or consolidate tabs
- Update the grid and list previews with enough information to entice users to click on brand
- Reorganize the entire card. Maybe a new way to view the profile entirely?
- Highlight more important information such as payouts, program details, how the brand tracks
- Reorganize the layout of the dashboard, improve widget functions
- Simply verbiage for first time users
IDEATION
Paving the Way
Our team reviewed our current user flow: Sign In → Dashboard → Marketplace and began iteration on our exisiting platform. We wanted to refresh the entire platform with a more modern look and feel with updated features and improved summaries.
VNext Experience
Starting with a mobile first design gave us the opportunity to focus on our main objectives and create features that align closely with our goals. Also bearing in mind, partners utilize mobile devices to conduct business on-the-go. After, we showcased our first iteration for internal feedback and and gained some interesting insights.
*Only previews shown as some designs may be kept for near future iterations*
- Nice to see more data, less images on certain parts
- Too much going on on the dashboard, lots of information
- Allow users to personalize experience (move widgets around, etc)
- Keywords are hard to use, lead users to filters
- Having discover turn into a "one stop shop" to find brands, ads, products, content is a plus
- Keep it simple - "Here's what we know about you and these are the things you can accomplish"
Simple right?
Not exactly.
Introducing Creators
Due to a recent acquisition, company goals shifted to include a new batch of partners the marketplace will be servicing in the future. Creators. With the addition of this new group and no definitive timeline at the time, our team decided to work backwards, imagining an ideal product with no limitations (of course with all the current and future objectives in mind).
Additional Objectives (Creator Focused)
- Find content to post
- Quickly get tracking links
- Get approval for a post
- How am I performing?
It's important to carry over aspects from the creator platform that are essential for their journey. Campaigns, tasks, and products play a huge role for brand-partner relationships. Therefore, we added to our platform's existing flow and created new pathways for creators and affiliates to access content as they navigate throughout the platform.
Partners can view and manage their campaign tasks, skim through brands with available campaigns, and view products available from each brand.
We took the internal feedback and protoyped this version envisioning what an ideal product would be with no strings attached. Some ideas may make it into the final concepts, and others deprecated due to ever-changing company objectives. Regardless, our team has created a great starting point and a visual of what we can possibly work towards.
*Only previews of iterations shown*
Create a link moved into the main navigation for quicker access alongside notifications and messaging.
Discover and buckets of curated content were placed higher so users can take immediate action.
Brands, campaigns, and invitations were grouped together as a quick summary.
The top navigation on desktop translated over as scrollable pills to put focus on the brand tiles.
Previews on each tile show the highest earning payout along with their respective categories.
Pre-qualified was added as another option for partners to instantly partner with brands if certain qualifications are met.
Different ways to earn sits above the fold to showcase potential opportunities partners can participate in when joined to a brand.
Below the fold users can find program details and promotional methods offered by the brand. These are represented by icons supported by detailed descriptions.
As a bonus, we created a preliminary design system as reference for iterations in the near future. Even if the colors and font are different in the final outcome, at least the foundation for components are already there.
TESTING & OUTCOMES
Future-Proofing
Alongside our researcher, we user tested these new iterations with 7+ external users (consisting of both affiliates and creators) and a few internal users that are experienced in building relationships with customers.
Participants were given 3 major tasks:
1. Explore the dashboard and join a brand
2. Join a campaign and explore content
3. Locate Create a Link
"I would say I'm most interested in recent oppportunities. So I would definitely love to see like what's super hot. Also I'm kind of confused, like what the search bar does. Like should I search for brands or should I search for keywords?
- Olia, Creator"
We've gathered all the data.
Now for the final outcome.
The MVP
After testing, we were able to gather all the notes and implement the necessary changes. However, we came to a compromise and designed a stripped down product. One that's not as complex, but more user-friendly and encourages interaction with profiles and enhances search capabilities within the marketplace.
Company objectives shifted and the version set to release end of 2022 is a modified version of our exisiting platform without creator features. The initial release will arrive on desktop with upcoming updates for mobile.
Additional features for creators will release sometime in the Spring/Summer of 2023.
