Prelude
Before Covid, I was working as a product manager for an Affiliate management platform. More precisely, I was working for a company that was hired to develop one. The platform was designed in a way that anyone who works in affiliate marketing can track and analyze their income regardless of the marketplace it was coming from.
The majority of the income of the company that was investing in the platform was coming from event management consulting. Educational and business conferences, that sort of thing. In order to kickstart the release of the affiliate management platform, they decided to develop an online marketplace for conference attendance. This all came crashing down when Covid hit. Outdoor events, especially huge conferences, and events were prohibited and nobody knew when they will be back. It was time to pivot.
Genesis
I saw this as an opportunity to diversify myself in design. I saw that just as our plans were ruined, people who were living off public speaking, education, and marketing revolving around conferences were having issues as well. As those people were pivoting their business online to social media, I suggested that we develop a platform where they will be able to create and sell their content. I was given the okay to follow that idea and present a solution.
I decided to draw up some storyboards and user stories to better present the idea. It went well and the team decided to do user research to see if there really was a market for this type of solution.
Research
Research has pointed out several problems that people face when transitioning their business model from the physical world to the digital.
People who are public speakers, influencers, and educators used social media to increase their following even before Covid. However, they would capitalize on their following by organizing live events such as conferences, workshops, and courses and selling tickets. Without that there was really no effective way to do that.
Another issue that creators had was that even the platforms that do provide some kind of a solution such as Patreon at that time didn’t have a way to customize the commercialization of the produced content. Meaning that the users could only post their content in the form of a post and put it behind a paywall. There was no way to organize an online gathering, create course or a workshop and engage with the followers in the same place. Platforms such as Coursera, or Udemy are really not that personal.
We spoke to several people that fit into the user persona of our solution and they pointed out that they are struggling with cash in the money they earn on different platforms. The payout process is difficult.
Design and testing
I set out to draw wireframes so that we can progress to usability testing as fast as possible while the market is open. The initial design focused on delivering a solution to the user base that solved the above-mentioned problems.
I designed a solution that allowed creators to release different types of content such as online courses, videos, and books but also organize online events such as workshops, AMAs, and such. The platform also gave them the option to commercialize each content release individually or place them all behind a paywall and have users on a subscription-type model.
I felt it was important to follow this up by giving the users the ability to track engagement and earnings with advanced analytics.
The previously mentioned Affiliate management platform that we were developing had a decent payout system. By adding step-by-step overlay tutorials to the interface and a checklist that corresponded to the country from which the user comes.
The last thing that I added was an easy way for creators to convert their following from social media into affiliates and earn money even if they are purchasing other creators’ products. This way the platform could be open and people wouldn’t mind sharing each other's content increasing engagement.
Before building high-fidelity mockups, we did a round of usability testing with the user base. Analyzed feedback and went back and made a few, not major changes. Then with the help of a visual designer, I finished my first design.
Epilogue
For the next year I stayed on the project fulfilling both the role of a designer and product manager. The fact that the design was mine made it so much easier to prioritize and also gave space for faster iterations. The platform had a successful release and the ecosystem now counts over 60k users.