CrowdRiff
Increasing adoption by 800% while supporting COVID-19 recovery
ROLE
Product designer
DATE
2020
LENGTH
1 month
CrowdRiff is a visual marketing platform that serves Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs). The role of DMOs is to market their destination to tourists. They leverage CrowdRiff to source, manage and use UGC (e.g. images and videos) for their marketing efforts.
At the pandemic's start, DMOs were struggling to source visual content to support COVID-19 recovery. People weren't posting to social media like they used to, and they didn't have time to shoot their own content.
In response to a company-wide mandate, my team and I were tasked with designing a solution to support COVID-19 recovery.
THE CHALLENGE
Support Covid-19 recovery: the solution should directly support DMOs and COVID-19 recovery
Ship ASAP: as the pandemic was rapidly evolving, it was critical that we get a solution to DMOs as quickly as possible
THE GOALS
I was the sole Product Designer for the Visual Platform team. I was responsible for the end-to-end redesign and UX research for this project.
MY ROLE & TEAM
My team and I were close-knit throughout this build. I co-led the workshops and UXR with my PM. I also worked closely with the engineers throughout the build. My entire team participated in ideation sessions and solutioning.
My contributions —
Product design (UI/UX)
UX content design
Wireframing
UX audits
Workshop facilitation
Research & discovery
DMO interviews
To kick off this project, my PM and I conducted interviews with 4 DMOs to understand how we could support them during the early days of COVID-19. Several common pains emerged from these interviews:
“I'm the only one on my team now. I'm doing whatever is needed since the pandemic started.”
— DMO 1
"My main focus right now is helping our local merchants and businesses... They’re really struggling."
— DMO 2
"People aren't going out so they're not posting to Instagram like they were before COVID-19...and I can't use a lot of our owned images because they're of big crowds”
— DMO 3
"As people start traveling it's really important to see that you're taking measures to make sure you're safe...We want that to be very prominent on [our] website.”
— DMO 4
Key findings —
Reduced teams, and higher workloads: As a result of COVID-19-related budget cuts, DMO team sizes were cut. In some cases, to a single person.
Not enough visual content: DMOs typical content sources were unreliable. They couldn't source content from social media, as people weren’t posting like they used to. They also couldn't create their own content due to team downsizing and lockdown.
Need for COVID-Safe visuals: Prior to COVID-19, DMOs' needed content to attract tourists. Now they needed COVID-safe content (e.g., people wearing masks and socially-distant activities). As the situation rapidly changed, so did their content needs.
New jobs to be done: The pandemic created new jobs for DMOs, which intensified their visual content needs, such as promoting local businesses and being a trustworthy news source.
Our interviews helped my team and I identify the biggest challenges faced by DMOs. To figure out how we could address them, my PM and I planned an ideation session with the Platform Team’s engineers.
How might we provide DMOs with a safe and efficient way to source visuals to aid COVID-19 recovery?
Team ideation outcomes
The ideation session helped my team identify an existing feature that could be reworked to serve DMOs’ new needs — CrowdRiff's upload portal, known as the Public Uploader. The Public Uploader lets DMOs source visuals directly from their audience via an upload portal they paste on their website or on a landing page.
We felt that refining an existing feature would be a better strategy than building a new one, as we could get it to DMOs faster.
At the time, the Public Uploader had very low adoption. Despite this, my team saw potential in it:
Support local businesses: Local businesses could use it to share their visual content with DMOs.
Source COVID-19-specific content: DMOs could use it to source specific visuals, like photos of people in masks.
Evergreen content source: DMOs could embed it on their site to source visuals both during and after the pandemic.
Following the ideation session, I moved into auditing the uploader, and it’s related settings page to identify UI/UX improvement opportunities.
UX Audit outcomes
The audit brought to light why the upload portal was seeing poor adoption rates — it wasn't usable or desirable. My team and I hypothesized that if we could address these issues, we'd improve its adoption:
Issues & opportunities —
Value prop wasn't clear: it was difficult to understand what this feature was and its benefits
Too complex: The page’s design made the setup seem more complex than it was
Too limited: only have 1 uploader per account
Poor discoverability: it was buried 2 levels deep in the nav
Too much setup friction: setup required a developer
Poor desirability: The portal lacked visual appeal and branding options
The audit helped me identify aspects of the uploader I needed to address to make it more useful and desirable for our customers. I was ready to start redesigning the feature.
Exploration & refinement
Boosting scannability
The current design of the uploader page was difficult to scan and created a lot of cognitive load. To simplify the page, I created sections that grouped related inputs together. Before I started wires I worked on devising these sections, and their headers and updated the form labels to increase clarity.
Refreshing wires & flows
Due to time constraint, I couldn’t overhaul the entire feature. But I needed to update the flows and page structures to allow for the new functionality we planned to add.
To keep the scope down, I had daily design reviews with my PM and lead engineer during this phase.
These wireframes depict some of the new functionality we planned to add, such as allowing DMOs to add background images to their portals, adding location info to images and the ability to create multiple portals.
Portal design explorations
To improve the portal’s visual appeal, we wanted to give DMOs the ability to add their own background images to them. Prior to this, the portals appeared in a drab grey box.
Here are some early explorations I did that I thought looked pretty interesting but ended up being too complex to implement. We went with a simpler, center-aligned version for launch.
Stepping up our content design
A big issue I discovered during the audit was the product’s UX writing. It was often too verbose, unclear and inconsistent. I used this as an opportunity to start a UX writing style guide for the product team to use. I tapped in CrowdRiff’s Copywriter, Kiyoye Marangos to help me create it.
This initiative also sparked a formal process for future collaboration between Design and Copy that we’d use on all major projects moving forward.
In what felt like the shortest 2 sprints of my life, my team and I successfully shipped the redesigned Public Uploader, but not before the Marketing Team gave it a sparkling new identity...
Final designs
To match its brand-new look and feel, the Marketing team rebranded the Public Uploader to the Collector.
Unlimited Collectors
DMOs could now create and manage as many Collectors as they’d like. I designed the page to include a clear value prop, a noticeable knowledge base link and actions to easily create new Collectors and view assets.
Setup Page: Everything in its right place
I redesigned the setup page to have clear sections. The labels and supporting copy provided help along the way to guide DMOs as they configured their Collectors.
More branding options
In addition to a logo and brand colour, DMOs could now add a background image and photo credit to their Collectors. I included tooltips with helpful info to ensure their Collectors were optimized for the web and always came out looking great.
Sharing’s a snap
Gone are the days when DMOs needed to rely on developers to embed their Collectors. Now they had 2 easy ways to share their Collectors via the Share modal.
Mobile-first asset collection
The Collector portal was designed with a mobile-first, modern look. Touch targets were enlarged to ensure people could easily upload assets anywhere.
Impact
In the first 6 months of Collector’s relaunch, we saw fantastic results. DMOs were able to leverage their Collectors to source content for their COVID-19 recovery efforts and beyond:
32,000 new visuals 300%↑
1569 new collectors created 800%↑
Created a new revenue stream for CrowdRiff
“The Collector was a hugely successful project for CrowdRiff. Every week our Customer Success Team shares a new way our customers are using it to get content...It's providing a lot of value to our customers.”
— Dan Holowack, CEO
DMO collectors
A highlight of this project was seeing the ways DMOs customized their Collectors for their marketing initiatives. Following is a round-up of some of my favourites:
Future enhancements
We didn't have time to include all the updates we wanted for Version 1. Following are the enhancements I would’ve liked to add in the future:
WCAG AA Considerations: I discovered a lot of opportunities to improve the accessibility of the portal, but couldn't address them all in V1.
Improved user flow: The user flow could be further improved for better feedback and control, such as adding a review step and back buttons. These were cut due to scope.
Interesting behaviours: Since the launch of Collector, we've seen some fascinating ways DMOs have used it. For instance, one DMO created over 400 collectors to source content from local businesses. I'd like to talk to DMOs more to uncover opportunities to assist with their goals.