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Background

A little bit about Spike

Spike is a social media monitoring, prediction and listening tool. It combines real-time feeds of web & social content with public engagement data, to help media professionals identify & predict the content that matters. The outputs are displayed through variety of dashboards; real-time, crisis, research & strategy.

Problem

Manual analysis of influential authors within social media or media websites was very time-consuming, and it posed a significant challenge for our customers. The absence of an automated ranking system hindered efficient research, crisis management, and real-time media monitoring.

Product & Feature

As a future-proof and enhanceable approach, we decided to lay the foundations for leaderboard widget by introducing first of its kind top authors leaderboard widget to Spike dashboards.

What does it do?

• Ranking: Identifies top authors within a specific topic or event.
• Insights: Provides actionable author-related information.
• Applications: Useful in research, crisis management, and monitoring use cases.

Team & My role

Worked with a full-stack team of five, including myself as a product designer, a product manager, and front-end & back-end engineers. As a sole designer of the project, my role encompassed conducting user research & competitive analysis, defining problem/use cases with product manager, designing and testing solutions, launching, and measuring results with analyst.

Process

Research

Objectives were to...

• Understand target use cases.
• Identify user needs about authors.
• Comprehend the process of analyzing authors.
• Define pain points, user needs, and expectations.

Methods were...

Quantitative analysis: Examined user engagement data, focusing on relevant tags in Google Analytics.

Competitor and industry analysis: Explored leaderboard features of 13 SaaS tools, assessing relevant features and best practices.

User interviews: Engaged 8 customers to explore scenarios, understand expectations, and identify pain points.

Online discovery workshop: Utilized Miro to present initial findings and proto-personas, conducting ideation sessions and risk assessments.

Testing & Performance Analysis

Usability testing: Conducted unmoderated tests with medium-fidelity prototypes and moderated tests with customers using high-fidelity prototypes.

Performance and feature adoption analysis: Developed a Google Analytics custom dashboard to track engagement, user preferences, and feature adoption.

Solution & Results

After three months of development, the feature meets customer needs, offering:

• A straightforward interface for easy author identification.
• Standard widget for quick overviews and an expanded view for in-depth analysis.
• Relative weighting bars for easy author comparison.
• Hover tooltips for a breakdown of total interaction data.
• The ability to exclude authors for curated lists and exports.

Performance Metrics (After 4 months)

Weekly engaged users with top authors leaderboard widget: ~10%.

• Weekly engaged users for dashboards: ~50%.
• Surpassing Instagram (~6%) and Youtube (~8%) engagement over 2+ years.
• ~65% of users engaged with the widget, also engaged with expanded view

Adoption rate: ~600 users

• Adoption is ~900 for the web widget, which is the default on the dashboard

Default widget: Upon high interest from PR users, we ended up making it a default widget in the crisis dashboard

After its success, leaderboard widget adapted to display top communities and top websites as well.

Product demo