Timeline
March - April, 2022
My Role
Product Designer
Team
Dillon Morgan – CEO Nick McCollum – Engineer Lead
Project Type
Saas, Web Application Design
March - April, 2022
Product Designer
Dillon Morgan – CEO Nick McCollum – Engineer Lead
Saas, Web Application Design
Placeholders is a popular feature in UNUM. It helps our users end their creative blocks when planning for their Instagram. It has high conversion rate because users will hit a paywall after they create a certain number of media and placeholders. We wanted to improve this feature by making it more contextual and functional for our user’s needs, so that they enjoy creating and continue using UNUM.
In social media planning, people must have content to post, but sometimes they only have the ideas or the content is not ready at the moment. How can they still plan when there’s no content?
After observing some Hotjar timelapse videos about how our users use UNUM. We found that some users use their own images with text as placeholders for collaboration among their team.
Currently, the placeholders in UNUM are just grey boxes, which our users love. They can move these around and replace with images. But it only fulfills the need to have a specific order and layout for their Instagram.
To end this creative block, we can let them create placeholders with label on a color background, and rearrange them in the feed. They can also edit captions for placeholders, which basically makes placeholders into blank posts with no media. By adding this feature, users can plan for their feed in a smarter way.
By enabling the user to gain control of their creative process, we can improve the user experience of the UNUM Design. This can make the user want to stay with UNUM.
The placeholder post is basically a post with a placeholder image as media. The label on the color background cannot be changed and people need to replace it with the image they want to use. If the placeholder as image is replaced, there’s no way to know if this post was a placeholder or not.
A placeholder post is a blank post with tag functionality. Any type of post – post with media, post with caption and blank post, can be tagged. Multiple tags can be added to a post.
This idea combines both of the advantages in the iterations above. A placeholder with label on color background is easy for planning the grid. Users can also use tag functionality for all types of posts. The only limitation is that users cannot add multiple tags to a post, so there’s only one tag for each post.
After meeting with and receiving feedback from the Engineer lead, Product Designer and CEO, we decided to test with iteration 3.
In the test, we asked our testers how they would like to name the “Category” label in the edit post modal. The “Placeholder” option got the most votes.
We received mostly positive feedback from the test and some very constructive ideas. 🙏
"As a graphic designer and community manager, this feature helps me to organize better my customers' social media. "
"It’d be great if we could add rows anywhere we want in the grid instead of all new rows going instantly to the top of the grid. We plan weeks in advance and it’s a lot of scrolling to rearrange. Or even being able to add a placeholder between two photos or anywhere we want in the grid (without dragging) would be AMAZING."
"Love this as a feature! Easy to use, quick, very helpful"
Placeholders with labels is a very popular idea to the users according to the results of the test, however, they seemed to have a difficult time finding where the feature is in the beginning of the usability test. We will further investigate the problems in the prototype, and improve the discoverability of this feature without disturbing the workflow of the users.
Our stakeholders were very excited about this new feature and can’t wait to release it to our users!
Before we present the designs to the engineering team, we need to generate some popular Instagram post ideas so that users have some default placeholders to start with! It’s a good opportunity to onboard the users and provide some value to them...the possibilities are endless!
Placeholders is a popular feature in UNUM. It helps our users end their creative blocks when planning for their Instagram. It has high conversion rate because users will hit a paywall after they create a certain number of media and placeholders. We wanted to improve this feature by making it more contextual and functional for our user’s needs, so that they enjoy creating and continue using UNUM.
In social media planning, people must have content to post, but sometimes they only have the ideas or the content is not ready at the moment. How can they still plan when there’s no content?
After observing some Hotjar timelapse videos about how our users use UNUM. We found that some users use their own images with text as placeholders for collaboration among their team.
Currently, the placeholders in UNUM are just grey boxes, which our users love. They can move these around and replace with images. But it only fulfills the need to have a specific order and layout for their Instagram.
To end this creative block, we can let them create placeholders with label on a color background, and rearrange them in the feed. They can also edit captions for placeholders, which basically makes placeholders into blank posts with no media. By adding this feature, users can plan for their feed in a smarter way.
By enabling the user to gain control of their creative process, we can improve the user experience of the UNUM Design. This can make the user want to stay with UNUM.
The placeholder post is basically a post with a placeholder image as media. The label on the color background cannot be changed and people need to replace it with the image they want to use. If the placeholder as image is replaced, there’s no way to know if this post was a placeholder or not.
A placeholder post is a blank post with tag functionality. Any type of post – post with media, post with caption and blank post, can be tagged. Multiple tags can be added to a post.
This idea combines both of the advantages in the iterations above. A placeholder with label on color background is easy for planning the grid. Users can also use tag functionality for all types of posts. The only limitation is that users cannot add multiple tags to a post, so there’s only one tag for each post.
After meeting with and receiving feedback from the Engineer lead, Product Designer and CEO, we decided to test with iteration 3.
In the test, we asked our testers how they would like to name the “Category” label in the edit post modal. The “Placeholder” option got the most votes.
We received mostly positive feedback from the test and some very constructive ideas. 🙏
"As a graphic designer and community manager, this feature helps me to organize better my customers' social media. "
"It’d be great if we could add rows anywhere we want in the grid instead of all new rows going instantly to the top of the grid. We plan weeks in advance and it’s a lot of scrolling to rearrange. Or even being able to add a placeholder between two photos or anywhere we want in the grid (without dragging) would be AMAZING."
"Love this as a feature! Easy to use, quick, very helpful"
Placeholders with labels is a very popular idea to the users according to the results of the test, however, they seemed to have a difficult time finding where the feature is in the beginning of the usability test. We will further investigate the problems in the prototype, and improve the discoverability of this feature without disturbing the workflow of the users.
Our stakeholders were very excited about this new feature and can’t wait to release it to our users!
Before we present the designs to the engineering team, we need to generate some popular Instagram post ideas so that users have some default placeholders to start with! It’s a good opportunity to onboard the users and provide some value to them...the possibilities are endless!