My roles & responsibilities

I was recruited as the sole designer on their team to create their software from scratch. Using their basic concept, I created a functional Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of their entire software, and eventually, worked towards a refining it into a scalable product.

I had many roles as their sole designer, but my primary responsibility was the UI & UX design. I focused mainly on creating clean and easy to understand interfaces & user experiences by using stakeholder and user feedback.

Introduction

Have you ever made a social post where you didn’t know exactly what would make the biggest impact on your audience?
Many of Cortex’s customers came to us to help them narrow down their creative decisions. Their creative teams faced many decisions throughout their campaigns. These ranged from a photo’s contents, the colors used, the wording and emojis used in their captions, and branding impact. Often times they will have a dozen or more photos for one post, to choose from. We analyzed their content, their competitor’s content, and various industry contents to let them know what was trending and catching their audiences eye.

The Problems

• Users did not understand or know how to utilize the information cortex was providing.

• Churn rate was increasing, and our growth was slowing down… Formerly paying customers were not coming back to the software.

User’s Goal

Use Cortex’s AI to analyze various social pages to get a better understanding of what posts, visuals, and captions are trending in their industry. Then use that trend data to make changes to their work to increase their audience’s engagement on their social posts.

Research

I reached out to a number of existing and cold users asking if they had time and an interest in giving feedback on our product.
I conducted these interviews over Zoom. There were a total of 9 participants that offered their time, each interview lasted anywhere from 30-60 minutes.
The participants were from the companies 111Skin, Artragous, BlueBird, Hearst, IBM, Kao, Paychex, Targus, and Utah office of Tourism.

Goal:

• Gain an understanding of how we could improve our overall user experience, or to add missing features that were crucial to the users comprehension of our data.

Challenges faced:

• Many of our existing customers were located outside of our local timezone.

  • Solution: Schedule user interviews outside of our regular hours (9am-5pm EST) to accommodate our user’s global timezones.

• Small to no budget to give money as incentives to users for user interviews.

  • Solution 1: Give product perks to existing users - Free of charge reports, custom PDF presentations for their own use.

  • Solution 2: Accept the interviewees that would take a smaller range of compensation for cold users. This meant our interviewees were from a broader range of professions and positions.

These interviews let me know that the current presentation of our data was not meeting the customer’s needs.
The data given was confusing and left the customer with more questions than answers…

• Often times users would not go any deeper than the top level to get their information. All of the information they were looking for was a few layers deeper into the software.

  • If the user did find the information they were looking for, it was not formatted in a way that made it easy to understand.

Empathy Map

Patterns found:

• 6 out of 9 participants found that there was a learning curve to using Cortex and understanding the data.

• 5 out of 9 participants needed assistance finding data within a report.

• 7 out of 9 participants said that they wanted more audience details for reports.

Overall findings:

• Participants were confused by some of the data, they were annoyed with the lack of explanatory info and context throughout the software.

• Participants looked for easier ways to get to or understand data. They looked for search bars, tooltips, sort and filter options, and various navigation options we were lacking.

• Participants wanted to know how to use this data in the report.

Needs

Ideation

What would help solve our problem of users not understanding or knowing what to do with the information given?

Ideas we moved forward with and why

Recommendations

Recommendations are suggestions given to the user to swap image contents, colors, aspect ratio, and/or caption keywords and emojis to increase audience engagement on their posts. This gives the user a clear way to utilize the information in Cortex’s reports, this information is backed up by factual data from the analyzed social pages.

Requirements for creating recommendations:

1. Define recommendations: Image contents, colors, aspect ratio, and caption keywords/emojis the users can change within their posts to increase their audience engagement.

2. Create the user flows & look and feel of the recommendations:

   1. The user view.

   2. Emails sent to the user when new recommendations are created.

   3. The Cortex employee’s (Admin) view.

      1. Create the step by step process for Cortex employees to make recommendations.

Creating the look & feel of recommendations

A few example sketches.

The Final look and feel for each section within a report.

The recommendation creation flow for Cortex employees

Notifying the user of new recommendations

Once a new recommendation is created the user be notified of it by email, to entice them to log back into the software.

I created an email template to be used to notify the user of a new recommendation and give them a glimpse at one of the created recommendations. Prompting them back into the software to see the rest of the recommendations.

Impacts of the new designs

1. Cortex saw an increase in customer retention and onboarding of new customers.

   1. These new customers had less questions about the data, and how they could implement it into their workflows.

   2. With insight into how to use the data to positively influence their audience engagement already paying customers were more willing to renew contracts.

2. Monthly active users grew 20% after changes were implemented.

3. Recommendations on how users can change their posts increased user satisfaction with the software. We saw more users regularly coming back into the software to see these recommendations.

4. Our new designs increased the conversion rate of free to paid customers by 5%.

What I learned

1. I had a somewhat hard time working with the development team due to the time zone difference and information being in different locations (Figma, Slack, Email, Asana, Google Docs).

   1. The solutions I learned to implement were:

      1. To occasionally be available after my regular working hours to setup meetings with Dev. to go over any questions/clarifications needed for their work.

      2. I suggested we start having all of our information for projects in one place, Asana would have a brief summary of the project with a Google Doc. attached, the details would be listed there. This included a link to the Figma files, UX documentation, UI changes, style guides, etc.

2. I learned to get insight from a variety of people on the team while working on my designs instead of afterwards. This allowed me to get constructive criticism and pivot my designs when needed before getting too far into it.

3. This was the first time I led the UX research of such a large project. I learned to be confident in my skills and get more comfortable asking why multiple times to get to the bottom of what the user really needs/wants out of the software.

4. I learned to be confident in my work, that it can positively impact the users overall experience with the software.

Going Forward

Ultimately Cortex failed to secure funding and the company shut down in early 2023. If Cortex had been successful this is what I would have done if given the time…

Work closer with other teams (Dev., Executives, Sales):

• Much of my work was done independently with feedback from other teams towards the end of the design process, I would get other teams involved in the process earlier on.

  • The Developers would be able to give insights on some constraints within my designs early in the process. I could change things earlier on, saving time for both myself and the Dev. team.

  • Both the Executives and the Sales team will have first hand knowledge into how the users feel about the software, and how we could potentially change things t help ease any pain points.

Revisiting designs after some time to see if they still met the user’s & Cortex’s needs:

• I would revisit these designs to make sure they were continuing to meeting the user’s & Cortex’s needs.

  • If these changes no longer meet the required needs, I would restart the process of doing user research and refining it further.

Work towards a fully functional mobile app:

• I think the software would have gotten more use and traction if we had put resources into creating a mobile app from the start. It was a work in progress, but it was not the priority.