Customer Briefing
The primary task was to brief the client in the format of an interview about the task. In order not to waste the client's and our time, we did a small cross-check on the competitors beforehand, used an application and prepared a series of questions. The script was composed according to 4 categories (category, company, competitors, clients) in the planes of past, present and future. It was necessary to understand the direction, vision, goals of the product and to make our suggestions and hypotheses go together, not in conflict with the plans and philosophy of the business.
It is easier to perceive and search for information when it is already written down and structured somewhere, so we wrote out the important points of briefing and formulated more precisely the tasks from the client.
In-depth interview
To understand the underlying motivation, goals, problems and objectives of the product's clients, we conducted about 30 in-depth interviews with different Influencers, bloggers and businesses. We made a plan and questions for the interview, found respondents, scheduled the interview and recorded the script.
Value Proposition Canvas
The next step was to break down the findings into pains, joys, and tasks. What did this give us? We structured the information from the interviews, saw common and individual pains, joys, and tasks. We understood that they can be different for different segments of users (e.g. blogger and business), how they differ and what influences this.
What groups came out for us:
The joys: from content creation, interaction with subscribers, planning (a sense of accomplishment), the convenience and speed of creating stories, the financial benefits.
Pains: expensive, too much application for different tasks (retouch, animation, etc.), emotional barriers, lack of time, complicated application, lack of functionality, dissatisfaction with templates, difficulty to make beautiful, lack of personality, unclear algorithms Instagram.
Tasks: search for ideas, brand recognition, media content processing, template customization, text, content preparation, trend analysis.
Then sketched out ideas for covering pains, tasks, and reinforcing joys.
Customer Journey Map
Next, we compiled the user's CJM, laid out the pains, joys, and challenges step by step, determined where the biggest problems were, sorted through the hypotheses, and removed solutions that were too easy, obvious, or short-lived. Why? Because about 7 design teams were working on this project and we decided in advance to eliminate the solutions that were on the surface, so they would not repeat among our competitors. Also, we got rid of the hypotheses that leave the field of our application and we were told about it during a briefing (for example, complex photo or video editing).
Two-Factor Analysis
There are still many ideas, all different, and it is necessary to choose the most suitable for the needs and conditions of the business at this stage. For this purpose, we used the scheme with the analysis in the planes of the complexity of implementation and the perceived benefits from the functionality. As a result, we were left with twice as many hypotheses, which we discussed again, identified those that we should take into work and the presentation to the client, and began to prepare a presentation.
And here are some ideas
1/8. Music for Stories
People create posts with music and waste time selecting it: they don't know the names of popular songs or artists, they don't understand if the genre fits the content.
If we do auto-select music for video stories, we'll solve one of the problems of creating stories, reduce the cognitive load, and reduce the time it takes to create stories. We'll suggest several suitable variants for the video.
2/8. Lots of text
People add too much text to stories and it blends in with the background. They don't understand how much and how big text subscribers will read.
If we create functionality to check the amount of text and its contrast to the background on the stories we will increase the «readability» of people's stories who don't understand why their stories aren't read but want to do it well and quality.
3/8. Unnecessary details in the photo
There is a problem - there is no quality photographic content and you have to «clean» the photos by removing unnecessary things
If we make it easy to remove unnecessary things from photos with one click then the user can remove unnecessary things without time-consuming
4/8. Slide Style
There's a problem people who create multiple corporate stories have to apply the same colors, fonts and logos manually to each template.
If we apply the style of one template to all the others then we can help people get through the chore faster.
5/8. Source
There is a problem only one person can work on the template. The finished template cann't be passed to another person for further editing.
There is an idea to allow users to send the source template to the client. It will increase the number of users of the application, and we will also give people the opportunity to collaborate.
6/8. Posting on a schedule
There's a problem when users try to post stories at certain time, and that's hard when Instagram isn't their only activity in life.
If we add scheduled posting, then users can delegate to us the responsibility of making sure their stories appear in their accounts at the right time. This functionality will tie them to the product, and thus increase the number of templates used and stories posted.
7/8. Interesting templates
There is a problem with the free version is very rare interesting templates, and the use of paid — not obvious.
If you make 1-3 paid templates free for one day, and change these templates every day, then users will be able to try a paid template for free, and check how useful it is (e.g. stories will go better). Plus, they'll have an excuse to go into the app every day to check out the new free templates.
8/8. Premium Template
There is an opportunity to get an additional channel to attract new users to Lift. If we create a referral program «Bring your friend - get any premium template».
Then users will start to involve in Lift their colleagues, clients and friends.And Lift will get additional benefits from free users.
