Nebula is a dynamic marketing collaboration platform that revolutionizes the way small and micro businesses interact with micro-influencers. Designed as a comprehensive solution, it encompasses every aspect of collaboration - from planning and negotiation to content creation, review, and evaluation, all within a single, unified platform. By streamlining the workflow and integrating essential functions in one place, Nebula not only simplifies the process but also enhances the effectiveness of these collaborations, thereby reshaping the micro-influencer marketing landscape.
🏆 Winning project for MUSE, NY, French Design Award
🚀 Deliver MVP version within limited time
June - August 2022 (12 weeks)
Xijia Zhang
Yiwei Lin
Yaya Wang
Jinrong Li
Problems
Micro-influencers represent a $16.4B advertising market. While they may have fewer followers compared to mega and macro-influencers, their audiences tend to be more engaged and are more likely to take action. This is also a unique opportunity for SMBs to leverage the influencer economy because it’s more affordable, and cost-effective while still widening a brand’s reach. But it comes with new challenges for SMBs and micro-influencers to efficiently work together.
Solutions
Process Management
Simply manage and track the timeline, tasks, and files in one place.
Reach out & Negotiation
Offer customizable templates and guidance for SMBs to easily create tailored contracts.
Content creation & Review
Allow instant updates and easy content reviews for timely and effective feedback.
Performance evaluation & feedback
Use AI to analyze influencer metrics and gain insights for upcoming campaigns.
Starting with secondary research, I began to draw from research articles on the topic of micro-influencers and SMBs - when I stumbled upon an eye-opening statistic related to influencer marketing trend from Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report:
“Experts predict that smaller industries will opt to work with micro-influencers. They exude authenticity, relatability, and credibility, which today’s audiences value. The market share of micro-influencers continues to grow. From an 89% share in 2020, it grew to 91% in 2021.”
Competitive Analysis
While keeping the above statistic in mind, we looked into a few popular platforms/apps focusing on influencer marketing. We found that almost none of them are targeting micro-influencers and SMBs who are beginners in this field with less experience. Even if they did, their efforts were focused more on the early steps of marketing than on the later steps of cooperation and collaboration. This then became our opportunity for the solution.
User Interviews & Insights
Since we have two groups of users, I drafted our interview questions into two versions and conducted interviews separately with 6 SMBs and 4 micro-influencers. I asked them following questions to understand what their biggest challenges were in collaborative process of marketing campaigns, and then compiled our data through affinity mapping.
It is worth noting that in addition to the pain points previously hypothesized in the article review, new insights emerged during the user interviews: SMBs struggle to provide clear guidance to influencers, while micro-influencers have a hard time receiving feedback from brands.
User Personas
We used themes concluded from interviews to create user personas representative of the attitudes of the participants. The personas contained characteristics, values, pain points, and goals that best represent the information we collected from our participants. To better guide our design and enable everyone on the team to empathize with our users, we created two personas.
User Experience Map
To guide us further in design and visualize how Molly Beauty Marketing Team and Jessica would interact with each other to achieve their goals and identify areas of friction during their experience, we created an experience map.
Problem Statement
With the user journey, persona, and insights from the research stage, we turned our knowledge into Point Of View (POV) Statements to frame the problem from the user’s perspective.
Ideation & Design
With our research findings and personas in mind, we brainstormed as many solutions as possible together by drawing an affinity map to categorize information and organize our ideas. After evaluating priorities and feasibility, we ended up with four major features that we thought were most necessary to be addressed.
Having these awesome ideas in our minds, we quickly visualized them on paper. It was a great way to make sure both of us are on the same page. We sketched out ideas individually and came back to present our ideas to each other. Then, we bundled ideas and streamlined overlapped ones. Our exploration centered around helping Molly Beauty Marketing Team and Jessica to work more efficiently, better manage their schedule, and track performance in marketing.
After we sketched ideas iteratively, we created a sitemap in tandem with 4 major user flows to show how the navigation should be structured and how users would interact with our product. The goal is to make a logical and easy route for users to navigate while mitigating any sense of being overwhelmed when they use NEBULA.
Testing + Improvements
1. After getting users’ feedback, we optimized the user flows by moving all the main features to the primary menu bar for easy navigation. (Campaign timeline, Contract Negotiation, and Content Creation)
2. Due to major function repetition, we merged the calendar tab into the campaign tab, users can now manage their campaigns in different views with only a simple switch.
1. The previous display mode makes the bars of campaigns seem too long, especially given consideration of one month or longer campaigns. We then decided to change the multi-row time bars into single linear ones, which makes them more clickable and better fits into different calendar layouts. Also according to our research, most campaigns last around 2 weeks, so we set the default display period to 2 weeks.
2. Additional reason we decided to change this interface is that after running a colorblind simulation, we noticed that the color we used would make pages unreadable for colorblind users. In order to enhance access for colorblind users, We changed the layout and use the high contrast colors to indicate different campaign information.
1. Use color-coded cards to categorize contents in different states and provide an easier way to filter.
2. Prioritize frequent-use buttons by moving them out from the detail menu.
3. Based on users’ feedback, a “Recent Activities” window is added for a quick overview of new feedback and comments.
1. After getting users’ feedback, we optimized the user flows by moving all the main features to the primary nav bar for easy locating. (Campaign timeline, Contract Negotiation, and Content Creation)
2. Due to major function repetition, we merged the calendar tab into the campaign tab, users can now manage their campaigns in different views with only a simple switch.
Final Screens
Style Guide
Impact
Lessons Learned
1.Best results come from small but frequent usability tests.
We understood that user testing allow us to see the problems from users' perspective and iterate our product towards a better stage, But after several rounds of user tests, I realized that a large sample at once hardly helped us draw insightful conclusions. Instead of an elaborate usability test, conducting smaller tests more frequently ( we ended up conducting more than 6 iterations) would reflect more problems and provide us with more valuable feedback.
2. Always tie back to the major problems and research insights.
During our exploration and development process, it was so easy to go too far or dig too deep into some tiny parts of the design. At these times, we always chose to bring back our research insights and used them to evaluate our design. It proved that the research insights and main problems really influenced our decisions and help us to thread the whole story together. Hence, I believe that insights play a pivotal role in shaping project outcomes.
