Where we started:
When we conducted NPS surveys, users consistently criticized the Influencer tool. Its functionality was subpar, and its design was outdated compared to Meltwater's newer design system. Moreover, the profiles were confined within the Influencers section of the larger MW app, limiting their overall usefulness.
Recognizing these issues, it became evident that a comprehensive overhaul was necessary. This included the task of making the profiles universally accessible throughout the MW core app, a significant undertaking.
What we delivered:
First, I delivered interim Full Profile designs. These designs were considered "interim" because they couldn't be fully built until engineering teams exposed APIs that provided backend profile data. Then, I moved on to designing a portable "Mini-profile" that would be universally available throughout Meltwater's app. With that done, I returned to the Full Profile and created final designs (using API data) along with a new CRM/interaction tracking tool.
Impact of this work:
The most significant impact of this profile overhaul was the transformation in customer sentiment towards the Influencers feature in Meltwater. Prior to this redesign, NPS surveys consistently reflected negative feedback about the utility of Influencers. However, after the release of these updates, we witnessed an immediate and noticeable uptick in customer sentiment from NPS surveys. Customers praised the increase in functionality and utility of Influencers, marking a significant shift in our customer relationship.
After the release of these updates, we saw an immediate and noticeable uptick in customer sentiment from NPS surveys. Customers praised the increase in functionality and utility of Influencers. Since Influencers directly competed with other products in the market (like Muckrack & Cision), this improvement in customer perception was a key component of maintaining market share. Before the update, we had received many NPS comments about information available in profiles, and releasing these updates made customers feel that their issues had been heard and addressed. Meltwater is an expensive tool (a yearly subscription starts at $10k and scales quickly based on features) so customer retention is heavily based on perceived value - and the Influencers redesign helped reinforce this feature's value.
Getting Started: As part of this design, there were some quick-win features added that required less engineering effort but gave users a clearer idea of a journalist status within MW's system:
I added badging in the header area to show whether a journalist was subscribed to outreaches through MW's message system, badging if the journalist was a private contact (meaning, one that a MW user added manually to the system), and a badge for journalists that worked for additional media outlets.
Additionally, I added metrics for each journalist's main source, including the scope of that source (it could be local, regional, national, or international) and the number of unique visitors to this source (pulled from our information pipeline).
Lastly, we began to explore assigning scores to influencers based on their relevance to Meltwater users. This helped multiple users in a team account track which journalists were most responsive to PR inquiries and outreach.
Influencer Overview
The interim design created for engineering while we waited for APIs to be exposed. Without these APIs, some additional user data could not be displayed in the profile.
Making the profile universally available: With the interim design settled, I focused on creating a "mini-profile" accessible from anywhere within the Meltwater app. This profile would need to only serve up the most relevant information about each journalist and be unobtrusive - since users were often searching for other information, we wanted that to be visible for context's sake while still revealing a condensed profile.
Mini-profile Content Tab
This mini-profile slideout panel gave users a quick, at-a-glance overview of specific influencers. From this panel, users could determine location, publish frequency, top content topics and most recent articles (including article sentiment).
Finishing the full feature build: I submitted a mini-profile prototype to our UXR resources and returned to the "ideal state" build of the complete profile layouts. With the results from UX Research, we began iterations based on the feedback we received. Users felt that the interim designs tried to contain too much information in a single view, so we split the content into tabs. This had a knock-on effect of helping the ideal design mirror the content structure of the mini-profile (which also had tabs).
Finished Full Profile Design
This final design for the full profile included details on the influencer's main source (primary outlet they write for), a scoring mechanism so PR teams could rank influencers, contact information including social channels, and a content card that could be filtered by recent/most popular content. I also began designing the Interaction tab (seen in next image) which would provide a more robust CRM interface for users.
Full Profile - Interaction Tab
This new Interactions Tab would give brief overview of metrics - including how responsive a journalist was to outreach - as well as show how an entire PR team might be communicating with journalists to avoid overlap.
Preparing designs for engineering: As part of this complete feature build, I created engineering documentation as we finalized and approved designs. This included layout guidance, typography requirements, and interaction behaviors. I passed this over to engineering, bringing a host of new updates to the Influencer feature within Meltwater.
Design Documentation
With final designs approved, I finalized all documentation for the engineering team. In addition to what is shown here, I provided error state designs + messaging, scrolling behavior and empty state layouts for Influencers who did not yet have data assigned to their profile.
Hear from my colleague:
"I was lucky to work with Seth on multiple projects during our time together at Meltwater. One of the most significant projects was a total user interface update to the Influencer profile workflows within the Meltwater Influence product. Seth was extremely diligent in doing competitor research as well as working with customers to provide options for direction on where we could go.
He was wonderful at looping in the entire development team as well as stakeholders across the organization (myself included) to gather feedback and create a workflow that would benefit the users. With each iteration he was able to work through the feedback and update the designs with ease. It was always wonderful to work with Seth and come up with functionality that would benefit our users!"