Activism Always

A Social Media Listening App
for Activism Always

Role

Product Designer

Duration

3 months (Oct. 2021 - Dec. 2021)

The Team

Naomi Susan (Product Designer)
Zahnae Aquino (Product Manager)

Project Goals

Create a design system and an MVP prototype of the beta product

Tools Used

Figma, Slack, Zoom

Methods

User Research, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping, User Testing

Overview

There is a lack of data management talent and data accessibility within the social impact and non-profit sectors, which minimizes the efforts of mission-driven organizations to get their voices heard. Activism Always uplifts non-profit organizations by providing data strategy services to collect social media insights on the discussions around social issues that their clients want to target. As their clientele grows, they are looking to transform this service into a SaaS product to make data accessible for all.

The Challenge 🤔

Design a solution that transforms a social media listening service into a product that allows users with no technical experience to access and use data effectively and stress-free.

The Solution 😌

The proposed solution is to design a dashboard software replicating Activism Always's services but as step-by-step features. This includes the ability to conduct trend and influencer analyses and receive recommendations from both. Tooltips and help guides will be added throughout the dashboard to help users become familiar with social media analytics. We believe this would create a beginner-friendly, encouraging, and reliable product.

1. Understand & Define

Naomi and I did not have previous design experience working with social media data and building dashboards; therefore, we thought it would be best to start with conducting research in the world of social media analytics. We also set up calls with the leadership and engineering team to learn about their past client projects and any technical constraints or limitations. We found that the calls were a great way to initiate a mutual understanding of expectations and the project scope.

Activism Alway's Past Projects

Project Requirements
& Limitations

Listed below are some important factors we had to keep in mind when researching & preparing for the design stage:

The beta product will be a dashboard platform
For now, the product will only be compatible with Twitter
The beta product must include the following 3 features:
- Benchmark Analysis AKA Dashboard
- Trend Analysis
- Influencer Analysis
There needs to be a download button for users to receive reports of their overall dashboard to share their data
Include a Help Option & User Handbook
Each analysis can provide general recommendations for users as a reference to improve account awareness; however, the product will be unable to pinpoint what the user's specific problems are and how to improve those problems

Other than that, we were given complete creative freedom regarding the overall brand design and anything else we would like to include to provide a better user experience.

Competitor Analysis

To understand the foundation of social media listening tools and how we can make improvements, we looked into a couple of different competitors. Since there were a lot of tools available, we ended up focusing on four distinct competitors chosen based on their seemingly affordable prices.

Competitive Analysis Chart

As Naomi and I were browsing from one platform to the other, one common emotion that we felt was feeling overwhelmed. As someone who wasn't an expert at understanding social media analytics, there was a big learning curve in figuring out how to use various tools and interpret information. A similarity between these platforms was that they focused primarily on features for tracking and planning, which are more for people who have previous knowledge of social media management.

By looking at these different platforms, we began focusing on who our target users are and what features and functions we should be including.

Persona & Customer Problem Statement

From the previous projects of Activism Always, we pinpointed that our target users would be a person or group in the nonprofit space with little to no social media presence due to the lack of knowledge about social media or the lack of resources at their disposal. An example of our target user is in the persona below. Additionally, we created a customer problem statement to help us remember to view the problem from the first-person point of view from the user’s perspective.

User Persona (left) & Customer Problem Statement (right)

Our Goals 🌟

Our user’s goal is to essentially improve their social media presence; therefore, they need a way to learn how to do that!

How might we ensure that NPOs are gaining useful feedback to help improve their social media account performance?
How might we help NPO users improve their social media marketing skills?

2. Ideate & Plan

Storyboarding

After developing a better understanding of Activism Alway’s projects, the pain points of our competitors, and the needs of our target users, we began organizing our findings and ideating the product. To start, we storyboarded three happy paths that include the key features our product would have: Dashboard, Trend Analysis, Influencer Analysis. Storyboarding helped us empathize, visualize the goals of our users, and well as act as a guideline for our next step in mapping the user flow.

Storyboard

User Flow

Below is a user flow that Naomi and I constructed to map out the framework to ensure we were on the same page with our managers before designing. The user flow allowed us to understand the overall functionality and steps of the product to improve the user’s needs. After we got approval for our user flow, we began to move on to the next stage of the design process.

Customer User Flow

3. Design

🚨 This portion of the case study will be split up into three sections to go more in-depth on the UX design process for each feature. Click the box to view!

Dashboard

This section is currently a work in progress.
Sorry for the inconvenience :(

Trend Analysis

Influencer Analysis

This section is currently a work in progress.
Sorry for the inconvenience :(

Style & Branding Guidelines

Our inspiration for the visual branding was to have a clean and minimalistic design system to complement our data visualization-filled product. We were drawn towards the bright blue, similar to Twitter’s blue, to act as the main color of our brand. Additionally, we wanted to ensure that our design system follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

My Takeaways

What I Learned

Working with Activism Always was an amazing opportunity to help build a beta product for social good! It was an intimidating project to take on, but throughout this project, I was able to learn a lot of skills to become a better designer. Some important skills I learned were advocating for the design process and confidently explaining my designs. There were times when it was crucial for Naomi and me to explain to our manager that certain action items were important to complete before moving on to the next steps, such as low-fidelity wireframes and testing. Additionally, my partner and I would constantly ask each other “why” questions to probe more into our design thought process.

A special thanks to the team at Activism Always for creating a challenging and encouraging space to grow as a designer!