Overview.

Promote user posting in Marlo

by redesigning “Create post” experience

After joining the Marlo team as a Product Consultant in 2024, I undertook the final design iteration of the product before its official launch to ensure an exceptional user experience upon release.

This case highlights my redesign of the post creation process, a core feature of the product, aimed at promoting user-generated content (UGC) within the platform to enhance user engagement and retention.

Team

1 Product Manager

1 Developers

1 UX Designer

Timeline

Mar-Apr 2024

Background.

Marlo: A brand new social application

for people looking for activity partners

What & Why Marlo?

With the invasion of online social media, especially after the pandemic, there is a growing need for offline socialization. However, when people want to engage in offline activities, they are often constrained by their limited real-world network. Therefore, Marlo aims to help people find like-minded activity partners by providing a channel for them to post their activities.

Prompt.

Optimizing the posting process is needed

to increase Marlo’s user posting

The design start from a business need.

Marlo is a brand new product start from early 2024. After the development and first round of MVP internal testing, our team wanted to increase the UGC content on the platform as much as possible so that users could feel the product value and cater to the users' needs, which is people could find activity partners by Marlo, to keep good user retention after the official launch of the product. Optimizing the posting process is one of the keys to achieving this goal.

Research.

Explore & Define the potential

opportunities for creating posts

Firstly, understand the current product logical of creating post.

To have a right and clear design direction, I experienced the existing creating posts process and organized the interface structure. Based on that, I understood why design is the way it is and ensured the current setting options are necessary for users.

Then, learn user behavior & thoughts from contextual inquiry.

From a product perspective, the current “Create Post” provides comprehensive settings and allows users to post budding kinds and sizes of events through Marlo. However, to understand how to further enhance the user experience from a user perspective based on the existing functionality, I conducted contextual interviews with 5 internal beta users and obtained user feedback:

So, what insights I got from research?

After having a thorough understanding of the product logic and user experience, I found a contradiction between functionality and experience in product design:

Design Goal & Metrics.

How might we reduce the cognitive load of creating posts for users while still keeping the necessary settings visibility?

Task completion rate will be tracked

After the product launch, we will track the bounce rate of users during the post-creation process to count the success rate of users completing post-creation.

Number of user posts will be tracked

After the product launch, we will track data on the number of posts created by users within the platform.

Design Process.

Explore different design patterns,

choose the most appropriate one

Before design, learn how other products do that by researching the competition before designing it.

Through market research, we didn’t find direct competitors. There are two main indirect competitors: LUMA and Meetup, which offer platforms for business organizing events and allow users to join their events. Unlike LUMA & Meetup, Marlo is a social media platform that allows simple users to post events.

By heuristics evaluation, I found that the two products use two kinds of UX patterns to create events. And according to Marlo’s product tonality, we hope creating post is a simple and lightweight experience. So, I decided to redesign the create post to be an interface that keeps in one screen, and the user could finish all settings in the primary layer.

Reorg the IA of the “create post” page from multi hierarchy to single hierarchy

To design a create post interface that contains all settings at the main level, I listed all settings, which will be organized into the new simple interface.

Explore & Tradeoff different ways to organize the interface to keep it on one screen.

According to the setting list, I tried different ways to organize the settings from a long list into a clear and straightforward interface that could show all the content on the first screen. Finally, I got the best option: user could create the post by text/hashtag/list for different kind of settings.

Final Solution

New “create post” with

simple but comprehensive interface

Implementation.

Create comprehensive design document

and handoff to developer

Consider the edge cases of each component, take the input box as an example.

After confirming the key screen of the user flow, I started to create the design document for development, and I needed to consider as much detail as possible for each interaction status.

Sometimes, it’s not just a simple jump between each interface. Also, some interactions need to tradeoff for better user experience and development costs. Take the following as an example:

Create wireframe with all interaction annotation.

With detailed consideration & annotation & communication, I shipped the design document to our developer.

*Because this version is functionally designed based on the existing version without back-end changes, there’s no pushback or constraint from the technical side.

Next Step.

Development & QA have completed,

and waiting for market validation now

Marlo (iOS) will officially launch on the App Store in October!

🎉 Phew~ You made it!