About the Project
Our client wanted to build a free, fast and easy “decision engine” that provides quick feedback to the user's questions and comments. They wanted to provide Q&A for private and public-facing groups. The social media platform should allow the user to publish any question and get a fast response to their questions. The core idea is building a community-based platform for registered users, aiming to fulfill the growing need for information and knowledge. They also wanted to encourage users to respond with urgency, and give fast, graphical feedback through this cloud solution.
During the discovery stage, we understood that the client required a cloud-based platform that will be a substantive resource for individuals and entrepreneurs. They wanted writers, scholars, bloggers, investors, consultants, students and other users to use this Q/A site and grow in terms of knowledge sharing, connection building and information gathering. Based on our discussions we understood that the platform should allow people to post questions on a variety of topics as well as read high-quality knowledge content that is personalized and relevant.
A Snapshot of the Project Requirement
- A platform that will attract users to post questions to closed and open communities. A platform where users can:
- Ask questions to get answers and other insights.
- Learn from credible sources who have firsthand knowledge of the subject.
- Get useful answers and share their knowledge with their community.
- Interactive dashboard for the admin and platform users.
- Multiple login functionality for users through other social media apps to create questions and manage their profiles.
- The users should be able to create and post questions in two ways – Private and Community questions.
- Additional functionalities like email notification if a user posts the questions privately and auto cut-off time feature to fix time duration to answer the questions, graphical output of user’s answers.
- Privacy and control settings for content creators for visibility of their content.
- Tiered payment plans for more account features and longer visibility duration of the questions.
Minor Bumps Along the Way...
We had to extensively increase our knowledge base to understand the nitty-gritties of Social Media Platform. Our aim was to help the client expand their user base; we researched various social platforms to understand what keeps the users engaged. We also conducted research to understand what doesn't work for them on a community platform.
The platform needed a roadmap that made communities discoverable in better ways and ensuring community engagement. Mapping out user flow took time and effort since it was essential to create a seamless user journey connecting all the other functionalities.
We had to break down complex flows into smaller chunks to make everything simple, be it signing in, auto email generation for questions posted privately, creating the questions etc.
Our Approach
We designed the application after acquiring a thorough insight into the social media industry. We understood that in user generated content platforms, a question answering system with online answers and other comments plays a huge role in building trust relationship between different users. Text mining from a Q&A platform with its online comments helps to collect content about issues users are most concerned about. And when similar and dissimilar responses are mined and compared, the results show that a Q&A platform influences user’s decision making to great extent. This insight was essential to understand the workings of the industry and understand how we could design a solution that catered to all these needs.
During our discovery stage we understood that we would also have to accommodate heaps of users with tons of information. Maintaining our commitment to aesthetic design, look and feel of the platform was also critical.
Workflow, Functionalities & Integrations
We began by diving into the ideation and design process, the first step was creating a user persona since it’s critical in the design process.
Our Ideation Process
- How can we make getting answers or relevant information more efficient?
- How can we connect users posting questions with potential responses?
- How can we make the navigation seamless so that it encourages people to ask questions with ease?
- How can we ensure more constructive answers and user engagement?
This insight was critical in separating the functionalities of the user groups and admin to define the operational parameters and goals. This helped us to simplify the functions and user flow. We incorporated functionalities like options to post open and closed questions either to the community, privately, or both. The users could also draft questions for later use as well. The platform also gave information about the top-rated question. We implemented conditions(formula) to boost the engagement to answer questions to highlight the top questions and top contributors.
One of the requirements of our client was multiple Social Media login options into an account. We gave multiple login functionality from the 4 most popular social media sites- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google.
Privacy Considerations
The platform served both public and private audiences, it was important to consider the public and private question settings for different user profiles. The privacy settings of a group (Public/Private) tell who can view the group's content and its members. In a private group, only members can view other members and see what they post. But in a public group, any user can see other group members and see what they post, including non-members. We considered all these aspects and combinations to display content.
Our Solutions
- Maintaining the functional and aesthetic balance of the platform was challenging, so we began with the ideation of user persona as it’s the most essential element of the design process.
- We considered the privacy settings for public and private user profiles, we focused on creating easy user journeys and workflows for signing up, creating the questions, and editing them.
- The user could create, edit, upgrade their user profile as well as manage community preferences.
- We designed features to support community engagement while allowing the users to personalize their experience. Our aim was to increase user discoverability.
- We ensured that the platform could be used by a wider variety of people. (Users, content creators, companies etc.)
- We also developed a mobile app for iPhone users, where the user could do all activities from app like, create questions, post answers, view answers, manage profile and preferences etc.
- Administration panel to manage system wide settings, payment plans and see public content created by users.
Minor Bumps Along the Way...
We had to extensively increase our knowledge base to understand the nitty-gritties of Social Media Platform. Our aim was to help the client expand their user base; we researched various social platforms to understand what keeps the users engaged. We also conducted research to understand what doesn't work for them on a community platform.
The platform needed a roadmap that made communities discoverable in better ways and ensuring community engagement. Mapping out user flow took time and effort since it was essential to create a seamless user journey connecting all the other functionalities.
We had to break down complex flows into smaller chunks to make everything simple, be it signing in, auto email generation for questions posted privately, creating the questions etc.