analyzing the market

Frankly had experienced wins and losses in the teen market with their ephemeral chat app, having been ousted by platforms like Snapchat and Facebook Messenger. I joined them at the moment they had decided to pivot their technology into different markets, suspecting white-labeling an SDK into private brand environments would give us the edge, and the first question they had for me was "who should we serve?".

Right away, I took a deep dive into competitor and market research to get a detailed overview of what we were working with. This was a great initial exercise as I quickly became an expert in chat/messaging before I even touched a pixel.

I worked closely with our marketing department, biz devs, and veteran engineers, including their input and expertise alongside my research. From there, we were able to determine our target markets.

SKETCHING CORE FRAMES & FLOWS

We divided our product into two categories: CORE and PARTNER. Our core product we kept to our MVP features - everything we needed to design to run our SDK at the basic level. Our partner products rested on our need to deliver something specific for a particular vertical, and were developed as feature extensions in close collaboration with our partners.

I began feverishly sketching every possible interaction I could imagine, taking our core PRD into consideration. This is the absolute most fun part for me, but admittedly, the most frustrating. Fun because I love unrestrained concepting - imagining all of the possibilities you can bring to a user through a little device is my favorite part of what I do, only second to seeing it in their hands. The frustrating part is limiting ideas to engineering resources, and in this case, keeping concepts as basic as possible for early product development. These constraints helped us exercise amazing discipline, however, and kept us referring back to the PRD, which instilled some great habits amongst our team. 

What really stood out to me and posed a bit of a challenge was the constant question - "what is the difference between chat and a forum?". All of the moving parts are nearly the same, so what differentiates them from each other? 

The conclusion I came to was TIME. Real-time interactions create intimacy and trust, which is what we were aiming to provide our partners. Logging previous interactions intelligently allowed for us to provide posted artifacts they were accustomed to managing with Facebook and Twitter, but the element of real-time conversation provided something special other platforms just didn't have. 

HIGH FIDELITY CORE FLOW

The big question was "how can we provide an experience for a bunch of different brands without it all looking the same?"

I worked closely with my team to begin identifying customizable elements (such as color pallet, font options, splash screens, logo, & naming conventions) that would work across devices and platforms, taking care to consider accessibility and readability issues. 

Color was a big one - if a brand gave us a color to work with (say, red for example), we parsed it out into 3-4 different variations of that red with a nice complimentary color to accent to cover various alerts, states, CTAs and text types. In stripping the experience down to basic, elegant elements, we were able to get away with a lot easy custom elements with a big impact. 

Systemizing these custom elements allowed for us to be quick in delivery for both iOS and Android, as we didn't have the time or resources to tackle Android as effectively as iOS. 

The core functions included account/profile creation, room overview/creation, messaging (in and out of room), media upload, alerts, settings, and additional content screens (for brand info, stores, etc.). 

Full experience vs a la carte

Our goal was to enable brands to connect with their audience in real-time, but not all brands came to us with the same needs. Some already had a working app, while others needed the whole kit and kaboodle. We designed our SDK to serve specific technical needs (e.g., account creation/profiles, chat, messaging) if they only needed a couple, but also worked with brands in creating an entire app experience.

ADMIN PANEL

Our core belief in creating this SDK was that real-time interactions between people can cultivate valuable human-centered connection. We wanted to give this to our customers to own within their own properties, rather than having to rely on the multitude of social platforms to do this for them. Two of the major values this brought to them were control and transparency. Control in how they cultivated this connection, moderation being a big sell. Transparency in getting a sense of their engagement analytics, things that are not readily available on other social platforms.

Alongside building out the user-facing designs, I began connecting our features to an admin backend for easy messaging, tracking, moderation, and reporting for our brand partners. We were limited with engineering resources, so I kept it to Bootstrap for quick and easy development.

Allowing the brand to do all of these backend tasks more intuitively via mobile (within the chat experience itself) had to be pushed further down the timeline on our roadmap. Though it wasn't an ideal solution in the beginning, it got us in the place we needed to be while we built those mobile features for future rollouts.

CHALLENGES

Our pivot from secure, ephemeral messaging apps meant to serve a broad range of users (e.g., teens, businesses) toward specific brands and their audiences rested in our need to find hyper-conversational niche markets. We could build chat functionality all day, but its just going to sit unused without a reason for people to connect and talk.

NOT ALL CHAT EXPERIENCES ARE CREATED EQUAL

My greatest struggle was truly trying to identify very human problems we were attempting to solve with the solutions we were creating. Every group we were working with were totally different from each other and each had their own unique motivations for participating in a chat experience. 

While designing fringe features, I tried to identify recyclable design patterns that could be applied to more than one vertical. Checking my work, I made sure they did they covered of the following:

1. Enable the brand to participate in one-to-many discussion experiences, coming away feeling empowered and successful
2. Promote the sense of intimacy and brand authenticity with real-time tech
3. Supported a safe and moderated environment

1. Enabling one-to-many discussions

Working with Victoria Secret Pink, I sent out a survey to their brand ambassadors (who acted as their verified users within the chat) to get a sense of their success stories and frustration points while using our platform.

Feedback showed me some were naturally great at getting the conversation going,  using interesting prompts that inspired good chatter. Others were not as adept at this. In addition, it was tricky for everyone across the board to keep a conversation on topic when their earlier prompts became lost in the natural flow of the chat. These two issues inspired me to create what I called icebreakers and docked messages.

Icebreakers

Icebreakers are exactly what they sound like–verified messages from the brand to get the conversation going. To help support ambassadors that needed an assist in kicking off an active chat, I worked with the successful ones to create a handful of prompts I then included in the flow as suggestions. This was considered to be a successful feature for them, marked by another round of feedback after launch (hooray!).

Docked Messages

Solving for the need to contextualize the conversation, I designed a special interaction that allowed the ambassador (verified user) to "megaphone" a message, keeping it docked at the top of the chat, knocking it out once another one was created. This was also an excellent way to save threads for future reference, outside of the real-time experience, which could be collected in an overview for easy scan of discussed topics (filtered by tapping the toggle button on the upper right of the nav bar).

2. Promoting intimacy and authenticity with real-time tech

The advantage of chat over posts is the 

3. Supporting a safe and moderated environment

A few elements we baked into the experience to promote moderation and control were message flagging, muting, blocking and automated curse word censorship. 

RETAIL LABS

When a large retail company approached us asking how we could apply our chat technology to the retail market, a million ideas came to mind. After a good deal of bot research and several rounds of concepting, I realized our tech had so much more potential than traditional messaging applications. 

Onboarding is one of my favorite things in the world. Elegant onboarding experiences are the butter to my bread, and hyper-personalized flows that lead the user to a field of dreams take the cake for me. 

People pick up the phone and call somebody in place of using an online tool because they don't want to have to deal with having to sort through the mess in order to get to what they need. They would just prefer to ask the question and get an answer. 

In the case of having a well-defined funnel (where, say, 90% of users have 3 specific questions/needs), chat's "if this, then that" logic can help create beautiful focus with an almost human-to-human interaction feel.

We designed a flow where exactly that can happen. The user is faced with 3 options, and the rest of the UI is revealed upon selection, allowing for a precise, no BS funnel, specific to the user's queries.