Context
Tailwind is a social media marketing tool that helps small business owners and entrepreneurs who don’t have a marketing team to design, schedule, and publish their marketing content to various social media channels. It also offers optimization features like hashtag finder, shoppable bio link, and post time suggestions.
My Role:
Sole Designer working alongside a team of Developers, Product managers, and the Executive Board. Contribution: User Research, Product Strategy, Prototyping & Design, Cross-functional Collaboration, Usability Testing & Iteration.
My Impact:
•8 months to launch a brand new product from scratch
•25% acceleration in the product development cycle
•6% increase in market share
•73% surge in user engagement
•30% conversion boost
Problem
Many small business owners have passion and ideas, but not the marketing know-how to surface their products to the right audience. Bigger businesses have marketing teams to maximize revenue, but small businesses don't have that luxury.
Picture this: You are a mom with 2 toddlers, who struggles to grow her homemade candle business while running a household all by herself.
❌ Lack of inspiration for social media marketing posts.
❌ No time to design and schedule posts.
❌ Needs immediate results but doesn't know what will work.
❌ No strategic plan, only guessing.
Solution
After thorough market research, the team discovered an untapped gap in the market - a service that tells users exactly what to post and when for their marketing. Tailwind Copilot offers a tailored marketing plan to each business owner with best-in-class practices. It takes the stress and guesswork away from business owners and lets them focus on producing high-quality products.
Goals
For Users 🗓
To help users without marketing experience grow their businesses by providing customized plans with step-by-step instructions.
For Business 📈
Streamline the discovery, experience, and adoption of Tailwind for new customer activation. Expand the addressable market for Tailwind to serve small businesses in their early marketing stages.
— How it Works —
Personalize
Tailwind takes users interested in Copilot to a quick survey to gather data on their business and marketing experience. It then uses this data to generate a personalized marketing plan. Users receive an interactive overview of their plan and an explanation of how it will help them achieve their goals.
Browse
After the overview, Tailwind breaks the marketing plan into actionable items users can manage daily. They see a "prompt card" deck with post ideas, explanations, visuals, and CTAs. From there, users can publish relevant posts at the best time.
Scheduled prompts are also integrated into the calendar, visualizing the user's week and motivating action.
Execute
After choosing a prompt, users can start with design or go straight to publishing. They are directed to the corresponding destination with a mini prompt card to guide them through the process.
After scheduling posts, users get a quick recap and more tasks to browse and continue the momentum.
Track & Adjust
While Copilot tailors marketing plans to individual businesses, users can still adjust their plans after executing them first-hand. The marketing plan timeline serves as a place to track their progress and make any necessary adjustments for success.
Results
Based on a 2-week rollout to 2/3rds of new sign-ups, users who received a personalized marketing plan are 73% more likely to schedule their first post (engagement), and 30% more likely to upgrade (conversion).
Next Steps
The current design accommodates different marketing channels with a primary focus on organic social ((Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram) and email. However, the system is designed to grow and eventually accommodate paid social and other untapped channels to expand Tailwind's market reach.
— Design Process —
Early iterations explore different progressive disclosure and gamifying approaches to help users manage and complete their tasks.
Design Challenge #1 - Accounting for different types of users
We learned from interviews that there are 2 types of users: those who prefer to do the minimum every day and those who prefer to get ahead. We initially only accounted for the first type, presenting only relevant and time-sensitive prompts while minimizing additional information that could be overwhelming. To accommodate the second type, I added a section for tackling multiple tasks at once and making progress in a concentrated period.
Case 1: Card deck design prioritizes only the most important task and prevents information overload.
Case 2: Interactive timeline grants users the autonomy to browse and choose the prompts they want to work on.
Design Challenge #2 - Creating a seamless experience
We initially designed Copilot as a standalone feature to gauge user interest. After determining its desirability, we integrated it into our core experience on the homepage. This allows users to see the most important task to act on and an overview of their week in marketing whenever they log in.
The isolated experience served the MVP to help us learn about user behavior, adaption rate, UX issues and more.
With the insights obtained from the MVP, we were able to seamlessly integrate the best parts of Copilot into the Hub.
Design Challenge #3 - Disclosing the right amount of information
To an average amateur marketer, an elaborate marketing plan consisting of the marketing funnel, campaigns, and various prompts can be overwhelming. As the designer, I was tasked with making an elaborate marketing plan easy for amateur marketers to understand. I used progressive disclosure to surface information at the right time and avoid overwhelming users. Prompt cards grab users' attention, and detailed information appears in the side panel when the cards are activated, giving users the context, information, and justification they need to proceed.
In an early iteration, we displayed multiple prompts with just the titles. We learned that this wasn't enough information for users to understand each prompt, and there were too many choices for users to make a decision.
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Therefore, we decided on a card deck interface that displays only one prompt at a time and shows only the essential information to help the user decide whether to proceed with the prompt or explore another one.