Sharing content on social media

Web design
Research
MVP Scoping

Issuu is a digital publishing platform where magazines, brochures, flyers, catalogues and all sorts of other marketing material are published as pdfs and turned into flipbooks.


In this project, we explored solutions to help Issuu’s creators to promote their business on Social media. I led research with customers, defined a target customer segment and key metrics, discovered how to provide value to creators, pitched the solution and shipped a polished design.

Issuu is a digital publishing platform where magazines, brochures, flyers, catalogues and all sorts of other marketing material are published as pdfs and turned into flipbooks.

The main need of Issuu creators is to grow their business and get more leads. In this project, we explored solutions to help Issuu’s creators to promote their business on Social media. 

Issuu in Numbers (2020)


  • 50 million publications on Issuu

  • 20 000 publications added daily

  • 100 millions monthly unique visits on Issuu

  • 4 billion page views per month

How might we help creators promote their content on social media?

Competitive landscape

User Research & interviews

User personas

Data & flows


Process
Ideation & Prototyping
Discovery & Problem framing

5E Design process

User personas

User flows

Prototyping

User tests

MVP Scoping

Design Handoff

Monitoring

Design & implementation


Problem framing


Issuu Creators are able to create many content types on the platform (Flipbook from PDF, articles, GIF, Visual Stories, social post…). This mind map helped us to make decisions and move forward in increments. 

We were leading the way regarding Issuu’s new marketing solutions, supporting a team working on integrations. 


User Research

Our Product team interviewed 46 people including 16 Issuu customers on their business and marketing habits. 

We learned from our user research that to provide value and be adopted, our solution should focus on automation and efficiency.

Four personas based on their marketing maturity level

Design principles

Empower creators



Creators need to be more confident about how to promote their business on social media. Sharing options should be convenient, easily accessible, and customisable. 


Educate at the right moment



Creators need a clear understanding of what will be shared and when, but also we should use this opportunity to educate them about best practices through webinars.



Consistency builds trust



UX should be similar across the platform when it comes to sharing content. Only the sharing options should vary depending on the context where the user is & the content type.


User flows

I laid out the pros and cons of each concept that I explored which helped us to make decisions on the various steps the user would take inside the Sharing module and move forward with one concept.

Combined with UX patterns research, we were able to define a simple user flow and to identify technical constraints that would impact our design choices.

Scenario


Valerie works for a consortium of 800 travel agencies. She is publishing quarterly catalogues on behalf of various brands to promote travel destinations and offers with the goal to generate sales. She wants to produce assets that can be shared on social media and through email.

User flow to send a GIF from Issuu to Mailchimp

User flow for the first Sharing module concept

Design iterations for a “Share” dropdown menu

We went with a sharing module inside a Dropdown solution for various reasons : 

  • It was convenient to have access in one click to all the sharing options

  • It was easily accessible from all the different parts of the platform

  • It was adaptable to all the content types on Issuu

  • It was scalable so that we could add more channels or integrations like Mailchimp

Usability testing results

  • All users successfully completed the task give to them inside the prototype which was to share their publication on Facebook

  • It's key to view all sharing options in one click

  • Adding a “Share” icon helps with recognition of the new feature

  • Showing the link of the publication helped users to understand what they were sharing

Outcome


The MVP was launched after a final remote moderated usability testing with 6 customers with an Invision prototype. 


Success metrics that we monitored were the ratio of creators sharing content from Issuu, the completion rate inside the Sharing module as well as impact on premium plans sales and overall MAU.


Content sharing increased by 8% after the MVP release and the first marketing integration was released in Beta version (Mailchimp integration).


We identified a number of opportunities and next steps to improve the experience further based on data analysis and user feedback, prioritized them with Product and put them into a roadmap for 2021.