Overview

User research found that prospective investors were influenced in large part by fund managers they felt they connect with on a personal level. A big focus for the design process was to explore ways the profile could highlight a more human side, that readers and investors could connect with.
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This was the first time paying contributors (fund managers) had a place of their own to curate their presence on livewire. Because of this the quality and value of the profiles needed to be clear from V1, even without all the features marked as ‘out of scope’ for the initital launch.

The new contributor profile design had to also consider the soon to come fund profiles. Therefore, the layout and patterns used needed to be flexible enough to meet the immediate requirements for contributors (people) but also for the soon to come funds profiles (products).

Challenges

Partner branding

Initital user testing with mockups that did not include company branding consistently raised concerns with partners.

Designs were revised to introduce a “brand strip”. A pattern that allowed contributors to include branding on their profiles, using a flexible combination of logo and colour. It was also important that a profile without branding did not look empty in comparison.

Featured wires

Contributors needed the flexibility to showcase 3, 2 or 1 wires on their profile without it negatively impacting the page layout.

More control for contributors

The previous contributor profile was essentially a chronological feed of wires, with essential information about the contributor. User research found that prospective investors were influenced in large part by fund managers they felt they connect with on a personal level. A big focus of the design process was to explore ways the profile could highlight a more human side, that readers and investors could connect with.

Two key features were added with this in mind...

The Opening Grab provided contributors an optional way to lead with a thought, quote or question that would reinforce their philosophy and/or current thinking.

Featured Wires provided contributors an option to curate and promote the wires they feel are the most important. This includes wires that mention the contributor.

Outcome

The product team did a great job de-risking the launch of contributor profiles by firstly grounding the project in solid user research that identified real user needs. High fidelity prototyping was used throughout the process to gain feedback from key stakeholders and selected users at each step of the process.

Building to learn was top of mind with detailed tracking setup to provide insights into how users were using the new profiles and surveys were setup to get some qualitative feedback. This data and feedback helped us test our assumptions and prioritise new additions to the profile.

While I was the sole designer on this project, as always, everyone involved in the project contributes to the design. We design it together, I'm just the one pushing the pixels.