Decooda CX Connect
Designing the CX Connect social media platform
Industry / Market Sector
Data analytics, business/productivity software, SaaS, startup
Challenge
Decooda wanted to create a thought leader content hub where customer experience (CX) community members could collaborate. I led a UX team in innovating CX Connect, a social media application that connects CX thought leaders with community members to share, engage, and learn CX information. Decooda was in the startup phase, and we had to design the new app quickly while operating under resource constraints.
My role
Design lead, UX/interaction design, information architecture, user research, market analysis, product strategy, feature prioritization.
In collaboration with
Executive leadership, SMEs, designers
Determining the features
We had little to start with except the high-level goal of creating a social media app where thought leaders could publish content, and CX community members would engage with people across CS communities.
As such, we began the process with research to find out what potential users were looking for in a CX community and market analysis to see what other content-heavy social media platforms were doing.
From this research, we distilled a list of potential features and prioritized them to determine what would be included in the initial launch.
Features List / Market Analysis
Early Concept DrawingDesign
We started with exercises to visually map the user journey and plan the pages and areas in the application where the different features will live.
We created early design concepts of the application functionality and flow with storyboards and hand drawings, moving to low-fidelity wireframes as we moved from ideation to design.
We reviewed our ideas with stakeholders and made updates as we gathered additional information, increasing the fidelity with each iteration of the design.
Once we had consensus regarding the content, behavior, and flow, we moved to "skinning" the design, applying UI/visual styles, including typography, colors, and graphics to bring it to high fidelity.
One of the things users wanted was a platform that would allow them to connect with other individuals, not just as part of a group or content publisher-to-content consumer. We designed the app around this desire. Besides allowing users to find and follow thought leaders and read their content and contributions, they would be able to connect one-on-one with thought leaders and other participants in the community with virtual room and messaging features.
Thought Leader User Profile
Adding In-line Feedback for ContentA default simple search would allow users to view content across all CX communities and topics. A robust set of filters would provide a method to quickly filter and narrow the results by people, topics, or groups. We found this to be a preferable user experience to using the advanced search and improved the search feature overall even for power users.
Outcome
We met the aggressive project timeline and completed the design of the application from inception to development-ready in four months. The resulting design was feature-rich for an MVP, allowing CX thought leaders to create and publish content and host events, and community members to engage with others in the community and find and access CX content.
The design was validated through mixed methods research, ensuring the application met user needs and accessibility standards.
We produced a prioritized list of additional features, ready to be added to product, design, and development backlogs with a proposed plan for future phases post-MVP.
Search results with filters