- Many times a day
- Several times a day
- Once a day
- Several Times a week or less
See Me is mainly known for hosting art competitions with career making prizes. Based on feedback from users we decided to launch a portfolio hosting service to compliment our art competitions. I conducted user research, performed a competitive analysis, developed task flows and wireframes, coordinated with our developers and produced the final design for this project.
Our biggest challenge was to give users a reason to use our site between competitions. With less than 2 months to launch we did not have the time or resources to create a full-featured social network. By integrating Facebook comments on each profile and a very simply notification system we were able to create a small feedback loop. We then fed this loop with a like button, sharing tools and smaller free challenges to keep up the users momentum.
Below is our research and analysis in a roughly chronological order. It was not a conscious decision at the time but by spending more time in the first phases of the project we were able to expedite the wireframe and prototype stages without accruing too much design or technical debt.
After optimizing competitions for several years we had a fairly good idea of our users behaviors. The initial user survey was created to fill in information on how our creative users used the internet.
I focused our anaylsis on users who fell into these dominant categories. These results heavily influenced our intial feature set.
Spill over from this feature set gave us a clear goal for our next milestone which we tweaked and tested over the next several months. The final breakdown of the first milestone was altered to focus around e-commerce. In hindsight this may have been a mistake born from a pressure to monetize.
I created a simple architecture diagram that illustrates the flow users would take through the application based on our goals of engagement and competition conversions. This step proved useful since we were able to quickly extrapolate Task Flows and elements of the Functional Spec from this document.
The signup process and the control panel use the same screens. The breadcrumbs and navigation shift after the user has completed the signup steps to be non-linear and clickable. This helped us to simplify the onboarding process and familiarize the user with the system as they completed the sign up process.
