Bootstrapping a habitat for the far reaching king makers of modern social media
Strategy, UX/UI
Complete case study
A notion doc with a more detailed version of the case study
Prologue
Role
As a solo product designer in our small team, I’ve been deeply involved in crafting and designing various iterations and experiments for our Android/iOS apps, web apps, creator dashboards and branding. In this particular project I contributed in product strategy, UX & UI.
The 1% rule
The theory is a general rule of thumb pertaining to the participation in an internet community. 1% of the net user-base will be the creators, 9% will be active sharers, and 90% of the users will be lurkers who passively consume content.
The 9%, Sharers
They are not the average consumers, they mean business, they spend a lot of time consuming content, the know whats good content, whats bad content. They amplify content and they are the king makers. Maybe they would want to be appreciated for it?
Strategy
MVP
Target audience 18-25yo, Primarily tier 2 & 3, tech savvy, active content sharers
Platform Android (App optimised for budget range devices)
North star metric To maximise number of unique viewers
Anuruddh (PM), Sagar & Advaith (Founders) came up with the MVP version of this idea. We would build a link conversion system where users can parse any internet link to get a smart link similar to bit.ly. Users can share this link in their network just like they would have with their original link.
This posed the obvious question as to what’s in it for the users? Why would they go out of their usual learned behaviour of sharing to share our link?
“Habit forming technologies start changing behaviour by first cueing users with a call to action” - Nir Eyal
Sharing good content to loved ones and network is an already existing intrinsic motivator for users. There’s nothing that we want to change there, in fact we want to promote that habit. But integrating SuperShare, an added friction in between this existing value chain is something that we wanted to solve for.
Hook
You share any link through SuperShare > Getting views on the links give you points > Use these points to buy gift cards and amazing products from our store.
Getting users
We went with a college campus representative strategy with the help of our marketing interns. These campus reps were paid to populate student users through word of mouth referrals in closed knit college communities..
Happy accident
One month down the line, we had to schedule an immediate 2-week downtime when our systems started crashing due to an overload of users. The current version of our product was not built for such scale in all the under-the-hood architecture, nor from a product strategy POV. But this also meant that our initial MVP version seems promising.
Working closely with our copy team, we strategised a positive message, positioning the downtime as an exciting anticipation-inducing event. We assured our users that we were developing something exceptional for them during this period. Importantly, we emphasised that their hard-earned points would remain safe, alleviating any concerns.
As the designer and architect of the product, my aim was to work closely with the product team to find a solution that would uphold the promise of 'SuperShare - The most rewarding way to share' while ensuring financial sustainability of the company.
Key solution elements
Gamify
Introduce game mechanics & move away from a transactional/utility driven relationship with user
Optimise
Optimise cost of rewards. Bring in more coupons and vouchers which can help reduce the burn.
Luck
Move away from guaranteed rewards to game of chances to cap expenses
Social
Start introducing social elements into the app slowly as the community of users are growing
Exploring game frameworks
We went ahead to map our solution to the Octalysis framework. Octalysis helped us to understand the positioning our solutions were leaning towards while also enabling us to expand and balance it if necessary.
Information Architecture
WIP & iterations
Final screens
Onboarding
This entire piece was a double layer Lottie that can transition the background & foreground animations in sync based on user swipe.
Login
Standard OTP onboarding flow. New users will go through an additional step of filling in name and username.
Guided walkthrough
Crucial for new users to get used to the link conversion and sharing flow through SuperShare.
Navigation sections
The main sections of the app were Home, arcade, links & profile. Users can create a Superlink quickly with the + button.
Superlink creation flow
Users can pick any internet link & upgrade it to a smart link. The link can track number of clicks, unique viewers, viewer location (Macro level, etc. Getting views and unique viewers to your links will give you points
Slot machine, raffle & leaderboard
The points that users collects by getting views on the links can be utilised to play raffle and slot machine events that update on a weekly basis. Apart from this these views also get them a spot on the public leaderboard.
Insights
Users can see global stats on the impact they have made with their shares, their reach, growth, etc. This is similar to Youtube/Instagram stats but at a very surface level.
