Building a community engagement platform
I led Insticator's product and UX strategy for a new community engagement product (post-acquisition), driving adoption by a number of high-profile publishers and creating a new revenue stream.
Stage
Series A
Type
B2B2C
Role
Lead product & design strategist
Deliverables
Customer segmentation, Product strategy, UX strategy, Product design
The vision
The starting
point
Before 2020 - Insticator provides publishers like Ancestry, The Washington Times, WebMD with interactive advertising units (Poll, Trivia, Content Discovery and Video) to drive end-user engagement and monetization.
Early 2020 Insticator acquired a commenting platform and launched the rebranded technology to the market as part of a plan to win over more Tier-1 publishers.
My role
I joined the team in Feb 2020 to spearhead customer research that would inform product strategy post-acquisition into the next 12 months, and ensure adoption of the new product by Tier 1 publishers. In addition to this, I was providing support to the design team with ongoing product design work.
“Alla has a swiss army knife of skills in design, strategy and product. She has incredible drive for solving problems creatively and the focus to execute on ambitious timelines. We worked closely on project for new product discovery, one that she spearheaded before I joined the team. Alla is a wonderful designer, a true leader, and a welcome collaborator. Hope we get a chance to work together again!”
Anna Kop
Lead UX Researcher at Insticator
Approach
Creating a shared understanding of the new target audience
Acquisition of a new product required the team to become experts in a new domain. Following a series of internal alignment workshops I kicked-off a lean foundational research project to engage with multiple segments of users and learn about the needs and priorities of publishers, as well as end users, around online commenting.
Delivering user-centered product strategy and
12 month roadmap
The research findings were then translated into outcomes and grouped into key business categories where Insticator needed to deliver value: Acquistion, Engagement and Differentiation. This formed the foundation of the product strategy and 12-months product roadmap.
Driving adoption and engagement of the new commenting product
After a full user interface revamp and integrating the acquired technology into our design system, we focused on creating a safe and frictionless experience for our end-users — enabling more engagement from observers and growing number of commenters.
Key launches
Community Spotlight
We’ve added an option for the publishers to enable a feed of top users, who posted the highest number of comments. This allowed us to reward the Super Commenter persona by highlighting them as the most engaged members of the community.
Content Recirculation
A key feature often sought after by publishers is content recirculation. We addressed this need by highlighting the most commented content across the site in the “Popular in the community” section, significantly increasing content discoverability and total clicks on the recirculated content.
Realtime Commenting
Some of our sites were getting thousands of comments on a single article, and we wanted to surface the activity in realtime. “Active on Page” counter and the “Typing Avatars” helped us provide that realtime experience, keeping the users engaged and preventing drop-offs from the page.
Article Sentiment
Some users won’t feel the need to comment, but still want to express their opinion to the articles they read. So we added an Emoji Reactions Bar that allowed such users to react with a single click. This feature was extremely important to engage Observer persona (users who didn’t sign up to comment).
1,6M reactions to comments
were added, including upvotes, downvotes and emoji stickers.
Comments Counter
The publisher can add a small and customizable code snippet to let readers know how many comments have been left for this article.
5-15x more comments left
we observed on average on sites that included the comments counter in their pages.
05
04
03
02
01
05
Improving publisher experience with customization, reporting and moderation tools
Early on we learned from research that publishers want total control over the reporting, customization and moderation of our commenting product.
Observing how audio and video user-generated content was growing in popularity and getting adopted by top publishers, we set out to explore ways to enhance commenting experience with video, ultimately finding a way to differentiate our offering from the competition.
Exploring divergent concepts
We started with a design sprint, during which I ran several collaborative workshops aimed at generating concepts to be further validated. The sprint was then followed by several research & iteration cycles, designed to gradually a systematically de-risk a new product initiative, until we've identified the best option for moving forward.
Quote from early research:
"I think people are way more likely to watch a two minute video than to sit down and read a 2000 word article. If you want to keep up with the trends, investing in video is the way to go."
- Audience Engagement Editor
Focus groups
with commenters
User interviews
using a proxy product
Interviews with influencers
& thought leaders
Interviews with publishers
in engagement focused roles
Narrowing our focus
Having explored three conceptual directions, we've returned back with a recommendation to pivot the original idea and focus on creating a video commenting & content creation tool for the editorial teams (acting as early adopters).
An audience engagement tool for seeding discussions & encouraging the newsroom to interact with readers - allowing editorial teams to create video summaries, realtime event pages, video op-eds.
Quote from research:
"I think there's so much distrust in publishers right now…like there's a lot more trust in individuals, even if they do represent an institution, so I think this is a really cool tool to help amplify that and help built trust back into the institutions.
It's not just the audience interaction, this is trust building, this is audience mining, this is data mining, this is potential growth an monetization."
- Editor
Impact
Commenting is driving the business
The successful rollout allowed for the new offering to become a significant percentage of the total company revenue.
The ability of the team to collect user feedback and ship relevant product enhancements back to the market incredibly fast, allowed us to gain advantage against strong and well established competitors. We were able to get publishers remove the commenting platforms of competitors with 10+ years in the space and adopt our platform, all during the first 18 month of operation.
2 million
monthly users engaging with the commenting section
70K+
monthly active commenters
Large-scale publishers won over and onboarded
(Evolve Media, Newmax, etc)
12 min
increase in Time On Page
84%
increase in average monthly comments