Social Buzz Club: Useability Case Study

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Interact with the prototype: https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/8ZTWZ3MA#/screens/22441660?maintainScrollPosition=true

Presentation delivered to the client explaining our methods, findings, recommendations, and demonstration of the prototype.

Screenshot of the home page. We began by exploring the client's website, and interacting with it as though we were the target users. We took screenshots and kept notes of our experiences using the site, and noted key problem areas.

We performed an analysis of the competitive landscape to get a better sense of the market space. We looked at competing, complimentary, and related services our users were likely to be familiar with. This also helped us get a sense of the mental models of the target market and of more seasoned professionals in the field.

Feature analysis of Social Buzz Club vs. its two most similar competitors. Social Buzz Club has wonderful support for their users, particularly those first starting out as content creators. They also have a learning center, a strong Facebook community, and access to a very helpful virtual assistant/customer support representative. However, they lack a lot of the functional features that the other sites have, like analytics, support for multiple projects, and the ability to sort content by topic. We explored which of these features is most valuable to their audience through user interviews.

Further Field Research and Expert/User Interviews

If we were going to help the client achieve their goals of increased user base and paid subscriptions, we needed to have an in-depth understanding of their users and what they would consider valuable enough to pay money for.

We read through trade journals, agency and consultancy articles, and postings in online communities.

Interviews were conducted with four social media professionals (people who were currently or who had previously worked in social media) and one super-user virtual assistant, who was both a customer service representative, and ran social buzz club accounts for people as a service.

The focus of this part of the research was on:

Major user challenges
Areas users would be interested in learning more about
The types content they repost
Benefits of community-building
What kind of content they would pay for

Key feedback we received from this research:

Analytics information is invaluable
Quality of content in general is extremely important
Any reposted content must be high quality and relevant, as it reflects on the individual poster
There is already a wealth of free online educational resources, so any paid resources must be very high quality
Users desire the ability to link several social media accounts through the service

Once we had this information, we were able to narrow the scope of the project and define how to address the client's goals in more concrete terms. This meant focusing on credibility and and usability as the most effective way to increase user comfort with the site, and therefore encourage them to sign up and stay active.

Our Plan of Action

Increase credibility of the website by:
Reorganizing the information architecture
Adjusting the overall feel/tone to appear more professional and supportive

Increase usability of the website by:
Encouraging integration with major social networks (use of APIs)
Reorganization of content
Streamlining key flows: submit buzz, share buzz, and sign-up
Provide clear visual feedback to users to confirm successful interactions

Integrate requested features:
Easy account set-up process
Refresh the visual design

Now that we had a clear course of action, we could begin to address the information architecture.

As the client was expanding their site to serve larger, more established businesses in the space, we needed to create a unified experience for all users. These diagrams illustrate the behaviors of their target users, and serve as an at-a-glance reference of their key needs.

Once the user's behaviors were defined, we could build a cleaner, more organized site map. As the architecture of the site is fairly shallow, we created intuitive groupings of related pages.

First iteration wireframes illustrating our initial concepts. We felt that using a portfolio metaphor for the interface would resonate with users, and support the context of the visualizations. As we disovered through our research that analytics were very important to users, we wanted to create value by prioritizing this information and making it easy to absorb through at-a-glance visualizations such as charts, ranked lists, and infographics.

To support the client's goals of emphasizing and encouraging use of the point system, we gave it high priority placement on the page and added encouraging language, as well as increased it's visibility on the site in general.

These screens are what the user would experience as part of the sign-up flow.

Second iteration wireframes. After receiving feedback from the client as well as experts in the field, we began to refine our designs. As the client wanted to promote participation on Facebook, we recommended encouraging sign-up through Facebook's API.

We wanted to make the sign-up process as fast and easy as possible to encourage more users to join. Rather than have the user complete the sign up process through a progression of screens, we instead put all of the information into a single modal.

Once sign-up was complete, the user would be greeted by the home page of their portfolio, with helpful one-time onboarding callouts to encourage immediate participation. Users can close the callouts by clicking in an outside area.

Once the prototype was complete we were able to gather user's feedback. In general, they appreciated the simplified flows and helpful text added around the prototype. However, there was still plenty of room for improvement. We noted this constructive feedback, and in the interest of time included it as part of our future recommendations.

In addition to the wireframes and working prototype, a key deliverable to the client was a professional design review document to detail the changes we recommended for the parts of the website that we did not have a chance to redesign.

This document was meant to serve several purposes: 1) as a snapshot of the current site 2) as a roadmap for future development of the site 3) as a reference document on sound design principles.

In the review, we mapped out both general principles and specific recommendations to keep in mind for both short and long term changes. The focus of the review centered on projecting credibility, creating value, and long-term sustainability as detailed in our Plan of Action.

The report included a screen-by-screen analysis for each of the pages we didn’t have time to redesign so we could recommend more specific detail-oriented or visual changes. We also assigned them priority levels of Medium and High with a corresponding impact rating to make it easier for the client to decide what to prioritize and where to allocate resources.

The report also included specific sections on quality content management and creation, user behaviors on the web and how to engage with them effectively, visual design basics, and a wealth of resources for further reading.