November, 2021 - January, 2022
Product Designer
Dillon Morgan – CEO Nick McCollum – Product Manager
SaaS, Web Application Design
In the UNUM Media Library, users would be able to save all of their photos, videos, captions, hashtags, posts, marketing ideas, and more, all in one place. They don’t have to go to each social media planning space to upload content. Instead, they can upload the same content to multiple social media platforms at once. It is a faster way to get everything ready to post! There are also powerful planning and creative tools that make building brands on social media easy.
UNUM wants to transition from being an Instagram visual planning platform to an all-in-one Marketing platform. Therefore, planning for trendy platforms like TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube became our priority. In order to optimize the experience of all social media planning, we began on our research.
Unlike planning for Instagram, visual planning for TikTok is not as important. In the current flow of planning for TikTok, users have to create a space for TikTok before they can schedule a post. It is unintuitive and unnecessary, so we’d like to get rid of the step and make it faster to schedule for TikTok.
In a visual planning space, UNUM users tend to “dump” a lot of their images on top of the grid and plan. They end up with a lot of images that they don’t use and it takes a long time to scroll down to where the planned content right above the live/published Instagram content.
After going through some data, our project manager discovered that users tend to have hundreds of items that they imported over time and became unorganized in planning space. This type of user is more sticky to UNUM, but the experience of planning too many items became difficult and time-consuming—it is hard to find certain images in the grid.
To solve this problem, we decided to test the media library idea that could help users organize and find their assets faster and easier whenever they want to.
Some design explorations for navigation
Combine Media Library and Spaces to make it a “Home” for all the medias. In the space, there’s also a quick access to the media library.
Prioritize all the unorganized assets (aka the media library - photos, videos, captions, hashtags, notes) first and make the ‘Spaces’ secondary.
Switch between library and spaces so users focus on only one feature at a time.
I made 2 design iterations for the media and note thumbnails. We decided to go with version 2, which has a more uniform look.
In order to be able to make changes throughout the prototype faster, I built components for the thumbnails.
After discussing with the stakeholders, product manager and designer, we decided to test with iteration 1 and 3. We also came up with a scenario for the testers to follow and finish the tasks in Maze.
In order to get accurate data, I set up the questions in both of the Maze tests exactly the same to prevent any extraneous factors from affecting the results.
There were around 50+ users joining the test and 20% of them finished all the questions. At UNUM, we did an internal vote for each versions and most of us rooted for the V1 to win. Here’s how the results turned out:
Both versions of the media library received good feedback from the testers. A majority of them would like to see this feature in UNUM.
The opinion scale of their overall experience for V1 scored slightly lower than V3. Most of the testers understood the idea of Media Library. Some testers didn’t understand the feature because they only wanted to use UNUM for Instagram, rather than for all of social platforms.
"It is similar to Canva, but seems more focused on Social which I really like. Seems like it would be helpful to get content organized, copywritten, and sent out in batches."
"A good feature that allows users to upload their media into a library and store it there until they're ready to schedule it. Good backup measure in case the original file gets deleted. Also good for teams, designer could upload into the media library and marketing/social media can caption and schedule."
I also found out from the report that, when asking testers to upload media, they often paused for a longer time at the import screen. It might be likely because the design of the modal takes time for users to process all of the available options. In the end, I came up with a minimal import methods selection UI that will help users make decision faster.
The “Create post” button was hard to find when we asked users to create a post with media. So I made more iterations of media hover states to improve this experience of creating posts with the media.
Both versions performed about the same in the usability test. Although the UNUM team liked V1, we needed to consider implementing V3 because it got better feedback than V1.
From discovering and examining the problems, to collecting insights for and from the test, the product manager and I were able to explain our decisions to the stakeholders and developers. Our product manager was able to break down the tasks and create actionable tickets for developers to implement.
I learned how to gather requests from stakeholders and users so that I could define the scope of the requirements. I also gathered insights that are useful, not only for this project, but also for potential projects to improve UNUM in the future.
In the UNUM Media Library, users would be able to save all of their photos, videos, captions, hashtags, posts, marketing ideas, and more, all in one place. They don’t have to go to each social media planning space to upload content. Instead, they can upload the same content to multiple social media platforms at once. It is a faster way to get everything ready to post! There are also powerful planning and creative tools that make building brands on social media easy.
UNUM wants to transition from being an Instagram visual planning platform to an all-in-one Marketing platform. Therefore, planning for trendy platforms like TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube became our priority. In order to optimize the experience of all social media planning, we began on our research.
Unlike planning for Instagram, visual planning for TikTok is not as important. In the current flow of planning for TikTok, users have to create a space for TikTok before they can schedule a post. It is unintuitive and unnecessary, so we’d like to get rid of the step and make it faster to schedule for TikTok.
In a visual planning space, UNUM users tend to “dump” a lot of their images on top of the grid and plan. They end up with a lot of images that they don’t use and it takes a long time to scroll down to where the planned content right above the live/published Instagram content.
After going through some data, our project manager discovered that users tend to have hundreds of items that they imported over time and became unorganized in planning space. This type of user is more sticky to UNUM, but the experience of planning too many items became difficult and time-consuming—it is hard to find certain images in the grid.
To solve this problem, we decided to test the media library idea that could help users organize and find their assets faster and easier whenever they want to.
Some design explorations for navigation
Combine Media Library and Spaces to make it a “Home” for all the medias. In the space, there’s also a quick access to the media library.
Prioritize all the unorganized assets (aka the media library - photos, videos, captions, hashtags, notes) first and make the ‘Spaces’ secondary.
Switch between library and spaces so users focus on only one feature at a time.
I made 2 design iterations for the media and note thumbnails. We decided to go with version 2, which has a more uniform look.
In order to be able to make changes throughout the prototype faster, I built components for the thumbnails.
After discussing with the stakeholders, product manager and designer, we decided to test with iteration 1 and 3. We also came up with a scenario for the testers to follow and finish the tasks in Maze.
In order to get accurate data, I set up the questions in both of the Maze tests exactly the same to prevent any extraneous factors from affecting the results.
There were around 50+ users joining the test and 20% of them finished all the questions. At UNUM, we did an internal vote for each versions and most of us rooted for the V1 to win. Here’s how the results turned out:
Both versions of the media library received good feedback from the testers. A majority of them would like to see this feature in UNUM.
The opinion scale of their overall experience for V1 scored slightly lower than V3. Most of the testers understood the idea of Media Library. Some testers didn’t understand the feature because they only wanted to use UNUM for Instagram, rather than for all of social platforms.
"It is similar to Canva, but seems more focused on Social which I really like. Seems like it would be helpful to get content organized, copywritten, and sent out in batches."
"A good feature that allows users to upload their media into a library and store it there until they're ready to schedule it. Good backup measure in case the original file gets deleted. Also good for teams, designer could upload into the media library and marketing/social media can caption and schedule."
I also found out from the report that, when asking testers to upload media, they often paused for a longer time at the import screen. It might be likely because the design of the modal takes time for users to process all of the available options. In the end, I came up with a minimal import methods selection UI that will help users make decision faster.
The “Create post” button was hard to find when we asked users to create a post with media. So I made more iterations of media hover states to improve this experience of creating posts with the media.
Both versions performed about the same in the usability test. Although the UNUM team liked V1, we needed to consider implementing V3 because it got better feedback than V1.
From discovering and examining the problems, to collecting insights for and from the test, the product manager and I were able to explain our decisions to the stakeholders and developers. Our product manager was able to break down the tasks and create actionable tickets for developers to implement.
I learned how to gather requests from stakeholders and users so that I could define the scope of the requirements. I also gathered insights that are useful, not only for this project, but also for potential projects to improve UNUM in the future.