A marketing platform for micro influencers: Showcasing work through portfolio building to drive brand collaborations.
Group Project
Design Challenge
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Claire Lu
Yubing Ge
06/2022
-07/2022
Figma
FigJam
Influencer marketing has become a go-to strategy for brands to reach new audiences and engage customers.
In the current creator economy, top-level influencers enjoy most resources and market shares. It’s increasingly difficult for micro influencers to maintain a stable income in the marketplace. We wondered:
We designed Popul, a mobile app that empowers micro-influencers to take control of their collaboration journey. With it, they can build-up their profile and portfolio, showcasing their unique value and communicating with brands more efficiently.
Creators can build up their profile to stand out in the market, and have a quick match with brands.
Creators are able to customize the display of their past work to best showcase their ability and style.
A communication channel to negotiate collaboration details smoothly and effectively.
To better understand and serve user needs, we started by defining our target group.
What Are Different Types of Influencers?
Why Micro Influencers?
We finally chose micro influencers as our target users, due to their lower price, high engagement rate and targeted audience.
Competitive Analysis
After defining our user group, we looked into the market, trying to find inspirations and gaps among existing influencer marketing platforms:
Existing platforms provide influencer discovery tools for brands and agencies. During the procedure, the influencers are relatively passive, waiting to be selected. We wondered:
We interviewed 8 micro influencers about their experience of establishing a new collaboration. After summarizing interview results, we first crafted personas to better understand our target users.
We used a Journey Map to highlight critical touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities during the process for improvement.
We generated three insights based on the interviews:
01
It is hard to attract and maintain stable commercial collaborations on their own.
“It’s much harder for us to find opportunities especially with good brands.... They (the agency) used to contact us, but it didn’t work out because the share they asked for was high.”
- Interviewee 1, Tik Tok
02
Current platform have constraints to display what they want to be hosted on profile.
“Every brand wants viral content. Each time reaching out for collaborations, I worry about brands seeing the content I just posted, which doesn’t show my true engagement, causing them to back off or hesitate to offer a flat rate.”
- Interviewee 2, Instagram
03
It is time-consuming to coordinate with brands on collaboration details upfront.
“I wouldn't mention my flat rate fee, because you have to have a bit of humility. Once they get back to me, saying we're happy to send you gifts. I would then actually go back andsay : I don't accept gifts, I work on a flat rate fee basis. “
- Interviewee 3, Red
After the interviews, we were able to make our design goal more clearer to change the current condition
How might we
create a platform to help mid-tier and micro influencers attract more commercial opportunities with fittest brands, and get smoother alignment with brands at an early stage?
We brainstormed 29 solutions for the marketing platform and picked four features to develop after voting and thorough discussions, including: customized display, bio, analytics, and flexible negotiation.
After brainstorming, we created sketches and wireframes to concrete the features into functions including ABOUT, PORTFOLIO, MARKETING ANALYTICS and MESSAGE. Finally we brought an mid-fi prototype to our potential users for feedback
To test our initial design concept, we made prototypes and conducted the online test with four previous interviewees, generating three main feedbacks to improve our design. Insights we got from the testings are:
01
Minimize the flow through feature integration
“I feel there are too many steps from adding components to finally apply and make modifications. I want to see an integral effect at a glance and then make the decision.”
- Interviewee 1, Tik Tok
02
Visualize user competitiveness in the market
“I couldn’t get enough valuable information just staring at the numbers.”
- Interviewee 2, Instagram
03
Simplify the profile page through navigate
“The profile page is a little bit too crowded for me to extract useful information that I am interested in. ”
- Interviewee 3, Red
Influencer marketing is a vast field, so initially, we struggled to identify the key problem. After exploring various ideas, we focused on the most significant design challenge. Recognizing the importance of depth over breadth, we narrowed down our target users through desk research and designed from their perspective, ensuring a more focused and impactful outcome within our limited timeframe.
From our interviews, we discovered that influencers primarily resort to online inquiries and peer consultation to address challenges. To facilitate this process, we envisioned a "Discover" function, enabling influencers to share portfolios and self-promotion tips. However, due to time limitations, this feature remains incomplete. We aim to refine the design to provide influencers with greater inspiration during collaboration pursuits.
Currently our project only focuses on how to help the influencers to improve their portfolio and share it with brands. However, the real process consists of other stakeholders, including brands and agencies, so it is also important to adequately address their needs, so we hope that we can develop designs that are as effective as possible for these stakeholders.
