Triplit

UX Case Study

Spring 2018

Client Project #1

The Opportunity

“Triplit is a platform to allows groups of passionate and travelers to create, fund, share events and adventures.”

Initiate goals with clients:

• Help content creators to grow, create, connect & collaborate.
• Follow groups of content creators within the same trip/event
• Be inspired, more intimate connections between users & content creators
• Revenue from fundraising & subscriptions by users or business fundings

More importantly, clients are hoping to make a positive influence on society.

Marketing Research

For this platform to be successful, we want to make sure every single aspect is being considered and setting ourselves off with the right scope to start with.

I reached out to a friend from Alibaba’s online marketing department and asked him :

What is the primary motivation is behind the companies who collaborate with influencers/content creator?

1. Expose to targeted audiences

Companies will find content creator who shares similar characteristics

2. Harvest

Eventually the audiences, or users in this case, will purchase, consume, or donate to this organization

Based on the AIPL (Attention, interest, purchase, loyalty) online business model, I came up with this graph as a guide for the team. I also reached out to content creators and influencers to validate the graph before finalizing our scope.

Question :

What is your role in this partnership? (between content creators & buisnesses)

Feedbacks:

• Social influence (Interaction with followers)
• Exposure
• Showcasing details (origin/material of the product)

Gladly, our client agreed with my proposal with individual users on the top of the pyramid, having our primary persona as mass audiences & secondary persona as organizations.

Research on Two Primary User Groups

(64 surveys & 10 in-depth interviews) We created 3 different surveys for individual users, content creators, and businesses/organizations.

Challenge # 1

Q: There is Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc,

How do we attract audiences to our platform?

Based on all the results, we found out that

70% of the user chose Instagram as their favorite platform

23.6 chose Facebook.

In a 2017 survey social network/media research, to fill up spare time was ranked #2 with 41%. Meaning the majority of the people use social media without a purpose, just within their fragmented time (time spam during each task, such as coffee break/before going to bed). Within such a short time frame, why will our users use Triplit instead of Instagram or Facebook?

Source :

https://wersm.com/the-10-top-reasons-why-we-use-social-networks/

Challenge # 2

Q: Since the platform mainly going to revenue from subscription/donations

How do we encourage people to subscript/fund/donate?

82.1% of the user NEVER donated/funded a content creator

Only 5% of the users is keen on funding content creators

Challenge #3

Q: 55% of the users use social media for socialization (friends or family &more)

The majority of the content creators have a hard time interacting with follower

How to create more intimate connections between users?

Competitive & Comparison Analysis

We concluded that Instagram is a platform mainly for entertainment (Majority of the contents are for leisure, skill learning such as clothing/cooking inspiration as secondary content). Due to the nature of Instagram, the only way to interact between users are from DM/replies, there is no other way to network with new people. Reasons for why Instagram is currently more popular than Facebook is because it provided tools (presets & easily adjustable settings for videos and photos etc, hashtags) for users with no background knowledge to create and grow, the platform itself requires a low amount of skill and technique to be successful.

Compare to Instagram, Facebook is more about socializing, but only to an extent, people are more hesitant to accept friend requests & connect with unknown users. The main purpose of Facebook is keeping users updated on their surroundings such as friend’s daily life etc. Facebook does provide a wide variety of tools such as creating events, hosting groups, messenger, market-place, games, and TONS of feature that the majority of the users will never use. Facebook is desperate to draw users back to its platform and compiling an enormous amount of features within the same website, providing convenience.

I tried to differentiate Triplit and setting off the project scope for a less competitive environment, which allows users to connect outside of their network to meet new people. Providing ONLY the specific tools that allow individual users and content creators to grow and interact, to avoid chaos like Facebook. The platform allows users to search for their interested groups/events, get updated on their latest feed for entertainment or inspirations, but also in a sense, I hope this application can be rewarding and beneficial for society.

________________Take aways from the research_________________

Our competitors (Instagram, Facebook etc)

Creating connection between users

How to encourage people to donate

Planning

(Affinity Diagrams, Feature Prioritization, User Flow, Personas)

Individual User (Primary Persona）Affinity Diagram ⤵

Sorted Version Individual User Affinity Diagram ⤵

We group up the same interview and survey results together and came up with categories based on the question. My design decision for the feature prioritization list based on this sorted affinity diagram.

Content Creator (Secondary Persona) Affinity Diagram ⤵

Sorted Version Content Creator Affinity Diagram⤵

We group up the same interview and survey results together and came up with categories based on the question. My design decision for the feature prioritization list based on this sorted affinity diagram.

Feature Prioritization

Profile- which contains individual profile, and event profile, the mass audience or content creators and more.

Event profile to track all the progress of the event, it could also be utilized as a common working space for creativity & collaboration

User and groups can label themselves AKA #hashtag to be discovered by people with the same interest

Explore- explore events, people or friends.

We include a filter function for users to be specific when searching for categories, location, and status of the event. Due to security purposes, I have decided that this application will NOT include the function of searching for users with the location-based system, simply because many of the users abused this feature.

Tools -Triplit not only provides a platform for networking and socializing, but it also provides tools for users to create intriguing content, such as camera filters for either video or photo.

One of the reasons people choose Instagram over Facebook is that Instagram provides people with easy toolsets for people with no knowledge and background in entertainment, it is a low skill-based platform that does not scare people away.

Interactions- We find this one to be challenging, because all the listed feature here, they already existed on every platform.

So we came up with some unique “Nice To Haves” which encourage people to donate, host of the event can set challenges/rewards when a certain milestone is being achieved.

Moreover, people always generate so much repetitive question either is for an event, or user, we want to come up with a back-end system which detects the keywords of the questions being asked, and eventually collects enough information to auto-reply the people with the similar questions.

Story Boards & Persona

Based on these Features, I came up with scripts for storyboards to let the clients have a better understanding of —

HOW Triplit can fulfill user’s motivations?

WHY people use Triplit over other platform?

WHAT special features do Triplit offer?

We also provided some background context of each persona, to bring clients into each scenario and understand the choices made.

Gregory (content creator/influencer) and his group influencer friends have planned a new trip; however, they have a really low budget. Gregory created an event on Triplit and fully elaborated on their purpose to support African wildlife endangered animals. He and his friends created a fundraising challenge to encourage and entertain the viewer & followers to have a more exciting and fun experiment from supporting this event. Eventually, Gregory and his influencer friends’ took advantage of their large fan base and successfully fundraised enough money to make this event happen, they accepted the challenge from the fundraising goal they set off “Livestream with wildlife animals”. The event got SO LIT, Coca-Cola sponsored the rest of their journey and be a part of the African Wildlife Support Team!!

Katherine (Individual Users) wants to go somewhere nice, but lacking inspirations. Katherine goes on Instagram and finds the content Gregory posted, she realizes Gregory has a whole crew travelling together and creating exciting contents. She finds it very frustrating to follow all the people on this same trip, SOMETIMES THEY POST REPETITIVE CONTENTS. Gladly, Gregory has a link within Instagram for his follower to follow their event and support them, Katherine was able to be inspired and receive all the content they created on Triplit!

Gregory gained even more follower&fans after coming back from the “African Endangered Wildlife Support” event, he received tons of DM to request an offline (local) event to interact with the followers. He finds it frustrating due to the nature of Instagram because there is no tool for interacting with other people besides “Like, share, commend, direct messages”. He links his followers and fans to Triplit, to an offline (local) home party event page which has the availability of only 4 guests. Gregory customized the joining method to “Bidding”, in which the highest bidder of the guest will receive the exact address with an official invitation sent. Eventually each spot bid for an average of CAD 200, Gregory was able to cover all the guests’ expenses and create a very special intimate connection with his followers face to face.

Design & Refine

I let my UX team create rough wireframes individually of each features based on our “Must Have Features” list. With the rough design, everyone gets to talk and elaborate on their design thinking.

After receiving critical feedbacks, everyone will re-design a new wireframe again, over and over until the UX team commonly agreed on one design.

User Test

1.

Within the explore function, our original idea allows users not only to explore for events & activities but also to explore other users by either map or list mode. Test feedback shows that majority of the users were confused by the user & event icon, but soon I proposed eliminating the “Explore User” function entirely due to security & privacy purposes. Also, since the client insisted on the “view by map” feature, it will eventually be another layer of interaction under “Explore User”.

Conclusion : The less interaction & transition = less confusion

2.

System feedback of “Sent” was the same colour as “Invite”. I proposed for a deactivated colour because this checkmark was used multiple times throughout interface design for multiple purposes, icons are not consistent; however, UI made their choice.

The inconsistency of Message Center throughout pages

Conclusion: Overall, the flow of completing each task with the wireframe was smooth. Users had to pause and figure out features that are foreign, such as donating & unlock challenge, etc.

Prototype :

https://invis.io/WCJA1UYNJZR

Summary :

It was an extremely fun & creative project to work on, clients gave us as designers a lot of opportunities to explore and create. If ever this app is being created, it will very likely not containing all of these new functions. There should be a transition period where the platform is slowly adding new features, instead of a bombardment of foreign functions causing confusion. The market & audience have low acceptance of entirely new features and concepts, which will most likely be scared away IMO. A good platform needs to be user-friendly enough that, even without any instruction/context/background knowledge, users can still utilize the tools provided.