Hello there wonderful people, I’m back with another case study. 👋

I’m Zab and I’ll be walking you through my thoughts, ideas, and challenges that I came across while working on my latest project. Let’s get comfortable and hop into it!

Understanding the problem statement 🚀

I want to enable our users to be able to make a newsletter on our app and start a micro blog/publication on their own. — CEO of the company

Designing a Curation experience for the users of a platform to help them make their own newsletters and microblogs effortlessly.

Business Goal: Promote creator culture and bring in means to foolproof content.

What’s my role? 🔮

I worked independently as a solo designer on this gig, or as I’d like to say it ‘problem solver’. My responsibilities included:

• Understand and communicate client requirements.
• Carry out thorough research and gather data points that help in fixing the puzzle pieces (the company was kind enough to share pre-collected user data as well).
• Come up with a product strategy.
• Document and share progress with the client.
• Build a common language and channels with other stakeholders involved in the product.
• And undoubtedly, Wireframes and Visual designs. ( I was hired for that right?) 😛

Breaking down my options ✍🏼

After thoroughly talking and thinking through the problem statement, I jotted down a few possibilities that could be carried out. My inclination towards using Twitter and exploration of a few paid newsletter platforms & templates got me thinking like ‘why not fuse the threads and newsletters?’.

Later down the line, I understood the limitations of this idea which were:

• Traditional newsletters are too element-heavy (structured) and difficult to consume in byte-sized info ( higher drop-off rate).
• They have a low appeal since they follow a newspaper layout.
• Threads like on Twitter would require curations to be very dense on the text side, which wasn’t the goal to solve this problem.

What’s the better bet?

Yes, you guessed it. Stories!

Hence, after talking with the client and showing them the upside of using ‘Stories’ as a mode of creation, I went in that direction to further develop the idea and product.

You may ask why Stories?

Because Jacob’s law:

Jakob’s Law states that people spend most of their time using digital products other than yours. Users’ experiences with those other products set their expectations. Failing to maintain consistency may increase the users’ cognitive load by forcing them to learn something new.

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform and industry conventions.

Straight up visuals 👟

The discovery of the tool is placed inside of a group chat window, to encourage collaboration in the culture and bring range to content.

The visual screens are divided into stages:

• Feature discovery
• Curation tool Layout
• Preview screen
• Content view & Box

Behind the scenes 🌄

To reach the final stage of any project, it has to begin somewhere. This is how it all started, with a phone call. Thereon, data had to be gathered, research done and put into a place to make sense of it later as the project would advance. It's highly essential to save every tiny bit of collected data as it might come up in handy at any time within the lifespan of the project. So here it is, the Information architecture, wireframes, and all the thoughts and notes that were useful.

Closing notes 🎥

Its been fun working on this project for the last 3 weeks. I’ve personally had the opportunity to explore the media and social space, things that I and the people I know around use almost as inseparable parts of life. I thank my client to give me this sweet chance to get to understand the creator side of things which guided me to think like a creator. Thanking you, the reader for making it till the end.

We can always get in touch and talk about random topics. Currently, I have a keenness to learn and understand more about Web 3.0, hit me up if that interests you. Reach me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Email.

I’m looking for full-time UI/UX designer roles, really want to work with a team of talented folks. Do let me know if there is space aboard. Cya! 😄