Helping Brandwatch users share insights more efficiently
6-month product development project
Who are Brandwatch?
Brandwatch are a B2B SaaS company that help businesses connect and understand their customers through social media. Consumer Research (BCR), Brandwatch’s flagship social media monitoring product, allows users to gain insights into their customers by analysing social media conversation.
For this project I was on the reporting squad, we looked at how we could improve the reporting capabilities in Consumer Research.
Problem
The shareability of insights is a problem at Brandwatch. Typical users are highly analytical researchers who uncover insights in the world of social media.
In order to share these insights with people who don’t have a Brandwatch account, users have to spend a lot of time exporting and customising the data into more visual mediums such as PowerPoint or Keynote.
Solution
A more efficient way for users to share insights. We created a new sharing flow that allowed Brandwatch users to share insights with people who don’t have an account. This allowed them to view insights on a range of devices.
Deliverables:
A sharing flow within the Brandwatch web-app (desktop).
A desktop and mobile responsive dashboard.
Link management section allowing users to edit and delete existing links.
My role
I was the product designer in a squad consisting of a product manager (PM) and 5 developers.
Primarily responsible for the solution and delivery of a defined problem (double-diamond process)
Facilitated ideation workshop
Conducted competitor analysis
Developed low-high fidelity wireframes using various tools such as sketching, Balsamiq, Miro and Figma
Collaborated with the PM on user research and problem definition.
Wrote user research scripts alongside PM.
Synthesised user research findings in Miro and Dovetail.
Conducted two rounds of user testing with internal and external users.
What I learnt
Collaboration is key - this was my first time working as the sole design contact on a product squad. Once I joined the squad I organised stakeholder interviews with the developers to ensure they were aware of my process and how I really valued collaboration. By inviting developers into the design process, it really helped me understand technical feasibility as well as teaching them a user-centred approach to product development.
Getting the right feedback - This can be really challenging, the more you open yourself up for feedback, the more opinions and comments can cloud your judgement. Whilst I fully believe in the importance on getting feedback, sometimes it can be counter-productive when people are outside of your immediate squad context, they might not understand the scope or constraints that have already been outlined. Make sure to take on feedback, but you don’t have to action everything in the designs.
If you want to read more, check out the full story below…
Discovery
User research goals
Understand how users interact with dashboards
Identify pain points users experience when interacting with dashboards
Test our hypotheses
🤔 We got a lot of feedback from the user interviews. We had to be really specific about what problem was the highest priority. To do this we split the feedback into various dashboard use cases e.g. sharing, exporting, visualising.
💡 After synthesising the user interviews we uncovered a common theme around exporting dashboards and the ‘share-ability’ of insights from BCR users.
Research findings
Users find our Dashboard export feature limited in options.
At dashboard level, we only allow for ppt export, and users would like a web page view
Users would like to…
Export dashboards publicly without having the recipient to login into BCR
Export dashboards with real time data
Apply their brand colours to visualisations
Rich text editor to format their ‘notes’ instead of using Markdown syntax
Define
Three themes from User Research
Customisation
Allow users to tell a story through with reports by making them more appealing and relatable for the business/client in terms of branding
Convenience
Users want to reduce the amount of time spent manipulating the data and want ready-to-use assets when exporting
Flexibility
Users want more options when they export into different formats
Problem
A current lack of export options means users are spending a lot of time exporting to Excel & Powerpoint to customise their insights, to then share with non BCR users. Users typically export dashboards to share insights with non BCR users because not all stakeholders have access to BCR or have the time & knowledge to browse BCR.
The Goal
“Helping BCR users to export dashboards in a more customisable, convenient and flexible way.”
The serendipitous twist
During this time a product request was flagged from Productboard (our roadmapping tool). It said that many clients had requested a feature that allowed users to share a dashboard via a URL link. It was also;
Cited in churn feedback as a significant limitation of the product
Similar, highly successful feature in Vizia (another Brandwatch product)
Feature offered by major competitors
This moment was a big ‘A-ha’ moment between myself and the product manager. It was clear that our user research findings aligned really well with the feature request. It allowed us to tag-on our existing themes of customisation, convenience and flexibility with a proposed solution.
Solution
To kick-start the solution phase I ran an ideation workshop with the squad to get some ideas on how we should tackle the problem. It was great to get include the developers as they tackle problems from a more technical angle.
How might we…
... allow analysts to share a dashboard link in a customisable, convenient and flexible way to stakeholders who may not have a login
Ideation workshop results
Competitor Analysis
We were aware that a few competitors had a similar feature. I partnered up with the product marketing team who took me through the dashboard sharing flows of various competitors. As sharing is a common pattern within product design I also looked at in-direct competitors such as Google and Miro to see how their flows compared with what we were trying to build.
Brandwatch merged with Falcon, another social suite, in early 2021. Their platform had a ‘sharing dashboards’ feature, to create consistency between the two products I looked at how they did it to see if we could align our design patterns. This introduced me to ‘systems thinking’ where I tried to see our feature as part of a larger system as opposed to being on it’s own.
Feature prioritisation
Once we finished the sketching session, the PM and I mapped out a user journey in Miro to understand the various features that we would include in the MVP.
Collaborated with PM on user story mapping
Wireframing
I started sketching out wireframes to begin with, before moving into Miro for a design review. I then took this into high-fidelity once I had sign-off from the developers that the concept was technically feasible.
Once I had got the wireframes into high-fidelity, we were ready to do our first round of user testing.
User testing
⭐️ The average rating was 4.95 from 10 participants (scale 1- very difficult to 5- very easy)
✅ Users completed prototype tasks successfully without any guidance
😍 All users said both prototypes were easy to use
Key findings:
Preview - users wanted to preview the dashboard before sharing with external users.
Link management - users wanted to be able to manage their links for security reasons. If information got into the wrong hands then they would be liable for the repercussions.
The final designs
Learnings
Collaboration is key - this was my first time working as the sole design contact on a product squad. Once I joined the squad I organised stakeholder interviews with the developers to ensure they were aware of my process and how I really valued collaboration. By inviting developers into the design process, it really helped me understand technical feasibility as well as teaching them a user-centred approach to product development.
Getting feedback - I should say, getting the right feedback. This can be really challenging, the more you open yourself up for feedback, the more opinions and comments can cloud your judgement. Whilst I fully believe in the importance on getting feedback, sometimes it can be counter-productive when people are outside of your immediate squad context, they might not understand the scope or constraints that have already been outlined. Make sure to take on feedback, but you don’t have to action everything in the designs.
Defining done - It’s the million dollar question, when is a project ‘done’? When is it finished? I ran a workshop on this with other product designers, I asked them for advice on when they consider a project to be done. There are a whole load of ways in which something can be ‘done’, if you want to talk further, get in touch!
Generative User Research - User research can come in a number of ways. It doesn’t necessarily have to come from the traditional way of running user interviews where there are ‘unknown’ problems with the product. It can come in the form of product requests from users, by definition the two are very similar.