UX Case Study: A Barrel of Blaphs!

This project was a community partner project that we did as a part of UX training at RED Academy. This was our first project, and a learning experience. (I cannot stress that last part enough.)

Blaph: an app that acts as marketplace connecting brands to social media nano-influencers (social media users with >1000 followers).

Upon the initial reading of the brief for Blaph (try saying that five times fast), I had only a vague understanding of what a social media influencer was. Obviously, in a distant sense, I knew that people with a large social media following or subscription level in youtube were getting paid to use products and recommend them to their followers.

But Blaph is different. You wouldn’t have to have 10000 followers and more to be able to blaph your troubles away (this whole case study will be filled with “blaph”-related word play and for this I sincerely apologise in advance).

The Opportunity:

Our client, James, had found that there was a niche in the market. Although there were competitors out there that allowed you sign up to market brands and products on your social media account if you had 10,000 followers or more and be paid for doing so, there was nobody taking advantage of the so-called ‘everyday man’ — those of us poor chaps with under 10,000 followers on our social media accounts.

The overall goal was this:

Design an app in which nano-influencers could sign up, browse through a selection of brand campaigns, and be paid (either in cash or a digital redeemable point system) for posting brand content to their social media accounts.

The project criteria boiled down these points:

1. Ongoing engagement with the app at several times a week

2. A way to keep human maintenance relatively low using AI

3. A compensation scheme that was optimised to the needs of our particular users

The Team

Competitive/Comparative Research

Before our kick-off meeting with our client, James, we started off looking at what other, similar products were doing. What was an interesting discover to kick off our research was that we came across no other competitor that was targeting specifically nano-influencers, which meant that Blaph was in a really interesting niche in the market. The main competitors within the domain were companies like Takumi, Tribe, etc — who focused solely on macro to micro influencers.

I decided it would be useful to look at some of the user reviews on the app store for some of the competitors — I thought it would give us insight into some things that users were enjoying or hating about the app to begin with, and give us a little information with which to begin creating interview questions.

These were some of the main points:

1. Users applying for campaigns would often spend much of their own time and resources creating campaigns, only to get nothing at all out of it.
2. The sites would often take months to get back to them with any kind of reward.
3. The rewards never seemed to be set from the get-go, brands themselves could get in touch with the users and try to negotiate a lower price, which made users feel unappreciated.
4. Sites would constantly ‘investigate’ social media accounts and delete followers/friends (this isn’t necessarily relevant to the project, but still!)

User Research

In beginning our research, there were several areas that we deemed were necessary to investigate further in order to gain an understanding of the product we were attempting to create.

We split up the research between us and each took a section, we did this because we felt that each of these areas needed incredibly deep insight and getting all three from a single interview would be taxing.

In hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have taken this route —it was later we realised that all of these were intrinsically linked and needed to be presented as such to users.

However, we gained detailed insight into all three areas.

Key Takeaways

1. Authenticity

Most of the people interviewed concluded that posting content for brands on their own social media would make them feel like ‘sell outs’, and they would view their friends doing this in the same way.

However..

2. Creativity

If the app gave them opportunities to be creative and the content they were posting was creative and innovative, it would be a different story, and an extension of their self expression

3. Human Engagement

Through looking at other websites, user reviews, and interviews, we found that a level of human engagement was important. People needed to feel that their creativity was being properly valued and that their work and effort was worth the effort.

We deduced from the people that we had interviewed that there were two potential users that we could be targeting. Obviously we didn’t necessarily want to be designing the app with a user in mind that wasn’t engaged in their social media at least on a weekly basis, which helped us narrow down our field of search to these two types.

It seemed relatively clear to us that Type 2 — The Creative Young Professional, was the smarter choice to go with, most importantly as they had higher levels of engagement with their social media accounts and were likely to seriously engage with the app.

What was interesting about this particular project was the fact that we had to view the users in a slightly different way — the preferred type of user was not just anyone, but people that could generate content for the app, and be paid for it. Keeping in mind this slightly unique relationship that the app had to the user was key to how we later created the user profile and designed the app.

However there were points and goals from the other user persona that were also going to be important to influence the design of the app — so we combined a few points from each.

User Flow

Use Case

What Would Tammy do?

Pre conditions: Tammy already knows what the app does and has downloaded it.
Task: Make an account, do a few questions, choose a brief, upload content, spend coins

1. User opens phone
2. User selects Blaph app
3. Blaph app opens
4. Blaph displays welcome screen
5. User swipes
6. Blaph explains what it does, why you should you use it, how you’ll be rewarded, points system
7. User taps ‘Get Started’
8. Blaph asks to make an account
9. User types in some info
10. Blaph displays how many tokens earned by adding info
11. Blaph asks which social media accounts to connect, with how many tokens you would earn for connecting each, with a bonus for choosing all available options
12. User chooses which social media accounts to add — its seamless, much like the process of adding social media accounts to dating profiles (opens in in-app browser, asks for details and permissions)
13. User inputs all info for permissions for adding social media accounts
14. Blaph displays how many coins you’ve earned already
15. App displays option to do a short personality quiz (could frame this as an innovative way to show people their worth or give them options for growth)
16. User can choose to do the quiz for more coins (which will reward them with enough points for a small prize, say a small uber voucher) or skip ahead and look at all briefs
17. Blaph displays homepage/dashboard with onboarding popups
a) will explain briefs
b) will explain filtering
c) will show you how to get to profile page
d) will show you how to ‘favourite’ or ‘save’ briefs for later18. User chooses a brief from ‘recommended brief’ to take a look.
19. App displays brief — this includes the (estimated) amount of time it would take to create content, the amount of incentive earned for this particular brief, and the percentage match with your ‘interests’.
20. App displays brief on boarding to explain what all the info means
21. App displays brief properly — including information from the brand about what they’re looking for (IMPORTANT: on tribe people were saying that the brief was too vague, maybe each section needs to be structured like a pre filled form). Also displays how many ‘spots’ left. Also includes mood board (type of thing they’re looking for).
22. App displays option to ‘save’ brief, or ‘upload content’.
23. User saves brief for later and returns to browse through other briefs
24. App displays list of briefs that are recommended, starting with highest match percentage with users personality and brand preferences and ascending from there. User has option to filter by amount of time, highest match, and alphabetical.
25. User scrolls through, but ends up going back to ‘saved’ briefs page
26. App shows saved briefs — also with ability to filter by time taken to create content, level of match with user, and ‘type’?
27. User chooses a brief, and reads through.
28. App displays options for getting ‘notifications’ for amount of time left to upload content.
29. User decides on _daily reminders_ until deadline day.
30. User looks through some of the other applications for the brief that are posted underneath. Finds one really cool and clicks on user, who has Instagram listed on his profile. She decides to add him on Instagram because he has a lot of cool stuff that he posts already.
31. Over the next few days, User creates content.
32. App gives daily alerts to remind her to spend time creating content. (Optimised so that she can do the content for the most efficient amount of time?)
33. When finished, user returns to ‘saved’ briefs and selects the one she wanted to apply for. (Will also show that she has chosen to receive alerts for this particular thing)
34. App displays brief page and ‘Upload Content’ button.
35. User taps ‘Upload Content’
36. App displays upload button
37. User selects content from phone library
38. App takes in content. Asks which social media accounts it can post it to if the application is successful.
39. App says it will give bonus points for each social media account that you add it to. It will post the stuff only if you are successful in your application and will ask for confirmation. It will post it at the most ‘effective’ time for you once your application is processed. You may cancel your application up to 24 hours after you’ve sent it in.
40. User presses selected social media accounts and presses ‘confirm’
41. App displays successful upload page and asks if user wants to return to homepage
42. App will send a bot message after about an hour saying something complimentary about the content and state how many views its gotten.
43. App will send regular updates about the application, and if the application reaches ‘featured’ will alert you.
44. App will send notification of successful application.
45. App will automatically add credits to to account after successful application is completed.
46. Next time user opens app, app displays option to check out in-app store for options to spend credits/tokens
47. Also displays option to see the other successful applications
48. Also displays option to look at user profile page, to see visualised data about reach, successful post etc

Storyboard

Customer Journey Map

We did two customer journey maps in order to both assess our own ideas for the app and to assess a main competitor (Tribe), to see if we could come up with ways of fixing low points that a user would experience using their product, as well as remembering to capitalise on high points.

1. Tribe Customer Journey Map

2. Blaph Customer Journey Map

Translating to Design

Paper Prototypes

‘Apply to Campaign’ Process (Mid Fidelity Testing)

‘Apply to Campaign’ Process Changes in High Fidelity:

Campaign Page (Mid fidelity to High fidelity changes)

Features Explained

Things that changed through testing:

1. Much more clean and logical way to add photos — we played with a couple of different ways of doing this.
2. Pop ups/steps within this process
3. Words/Language -find vs browse, whats the difference?

If we’d had more time:

We actually had a follow up meeting our client a few weeks after our presentation. It was fantastic to get some good feedback on the product, especially because, being so close to it, there were things that we hadn’t realized we needed to fix about the app.

1. More calls to action — the design needs to be encouraging the user to make certain decision, and with the current design there are few clear calls to action that encourage the user to actively engage with the product
2. Creating a community
3. Business rewards — we realised early on that many of the types of people that would be beneficial to the app itself in generating content

This project was a learning experience and an incredible learning curve, and being able to get feedback on our first UX project was a helpful experience in growing as a UX Designer and has given me as a UX designer a wealth of knowledge (mostly learned from mistakes, admittedly) upon which to develop my skills.

Thanks for checking out my case study! Please do check out my other ones (they’re filled with fun and terrible puns!) and if you have a sec have a look at my porfolio:

www.siobhanweber.com

Have an excellent day, you nifty human, you!