DESIGN FOR ENGAGEMENT
The Fairygodboss Community
Fairygodboss.com
Fairygodboss: The community feed is the heart of the site. Users can post questions, share links, upload photos, place comments and replies… all with the option to remain anonymous.
Challenge: Build it! Over the past 3 years we’ve upgraded a simple platform into a robust, engaging forum that drives returns and feeds our highly successful daily transactional emails. Additional features designed include a full groups platform for communities that want to remain private; messaging and notifications for connecting, inviting and sharing, and simple, clear profiles for putting your best self forward to the other members of Fairygodboss.
Action: As we optimize for engagement, the design process ensures we launch features that have proven effective in testing (Optimize, user testing) and are based on data-driven decisions to focus on the stated goals for the project. In this case, engagement and returns.
Result: Engagement, returns and time on site continue to increase and releases are meeting specified goals for each project. Check out the Fairygodboss community here >.
Custom User Generated Content Platform
Levo.com
The challenge:
Levo’s platform provided career advice and thought leadership for millennials (at the time, people in the first 10 years of their career.) We had a large number of VIPs who wanted to publish articles on our platform, and we wanted more content to push out to registered users through email, to drive returns.
The goal for this project:
Design a simple, elegant user interface for contributors to create, edit and publish their own content on Levo, allowing them to broadcast to their followers, as well as the entire Levo community. The MVP would be the proof-of-concept to attract even more writers and thought leaders, so it needed to be functional and customizable for the user, with professional looking, credible posts that look as polished as Levo’s official staff editorial content.
Actions:
Research & discovery: Identify the highest-value beta contributors and conduct interviews to determine their required features. What do other sites have that they find most valuable? Conduct research on other platforms, identify best practices and component design approach.
Identify: Impact on the site, supporting product requirements, how this impacts transactional emails, how to encourage engagement.
Product & design recommendations: We created an article publishing product that did not require access to our CMS. It had robust features using an embedded editor (Froala), and included elements for engagement and delight (reaction/share bar, user tagging, emoji, commenting with support for images.) We updated our emails to include these posts for users who are following specific contributors. Syndicated partners could direct their blog content directly to Levo followers through API integration.
Testing: We tested the editor with ~50 beta contributors before rolling out the full platform to our entire contributor list.
Results:
Was the feature adopted by the VIP contributors? Yes.
Was user engagement impacted positively by the new features? Yes.
Was more content produced as a result of this product? Yes.
Did the increase in content result in increased returns from email? Yes.
Bonus: Post launch, the Levo Voices platform attracted a significant number of applicants who wanted to become contributors.