Happs
June 2019 - March 2020
Lead Product Designer
Head of Product
2 Full Stack Engineers
2 Research Interns
4 Broadcast Producers
I led all design efforts on the project including discovery, ideation, design, prototyping and user testing.
Happs had already established a growing community of passionate contributors that were regularly pitching story ideas via Slack. We first needed to extract insights from this community in order to understand what was working and what additional features were lacking. We wanted our community to transition into this new product as smoothly as possible and start collaborating with our production team on quality stories.
We aligned on a qualitative approach to better understand the wants and needs of our Slack community and identify pain points as well as potential solutions for our product.
12 interviews with very active users
8 interviews with new or somewhat new users
2 Happs producers were interviewed various times throughout round 1
Three key insights emerged during our research that led us to three opportunity areas worth exploring:
Key Insight #1 - New users are unclear about how to start participating.
Adam Lucente, Freelance journalist based in Iraq
Key Insight #2 - The majority of users expressed a desire to establish a personal identity within the community.
Lucia Aybar, Architect and Happs Community Leader in Dominican Republic
Key Insight #3 - Producers need an easier way to find, keep track of and develop promising stories.
Andi Johnson, Happs Producer in Los Angeles
In order to generate a large amount of viable solutions to these problems in a short amount of time, we conducted a design studio with our whole team. Each participant was encouraged to sketch proposed solutions very quickly, aiming for quantity over quality, to explore a range of ideas and generate creative solutions.
Solution #1 - Community Education
We also did some additional ideation around how we might redesign a contributors initial experience signing up for on the platform.
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Solution #2 - Newsroom Feed and Broadcast Development
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Contributors can compose a pitch in multiple forms (text, link, photo and video) and that pitch can be voted on by the community after posting. Pitches that garner a lot of attention from our community are surfaced to our producers who can flag them and develop the story all the way through to broadcast.
Solution #3 - Newsroom Feed and Broadcast Development
Our next step was to drill down deeper into our possible solutions. I felt that a user story mapping exercise would be the most effective use of our time. The final product of this would be a clear path for our design phase and a useful backlog for our engineering team.
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During the course of a week, our team set aside an hour or two per day to focus on the user story map. By the end of our last session we had a very clear roadmap of what needed to be built.
Here is an actual example of some of the post it notes from our exercise.
During the course of three weeks, I designed the entire UI for the Happs Virtual Newsroom. We worked in agile sprints, our developers were in the same room as me every day which made things a lot easier.
User Testing Methodology
We conducted moderated usability testing of our first prototype with both contributors and producers. We used the following metrics:
Findings
Working in an agile and collaborative manner was a great way to make sure that there were no surprises within the development cycle. Our engineers were very accessible and worked closely with us on exercises like user story mapping and also made themselves available to discuss UI nuances during the design phase.
This project emphasized the importance of validating decisions with users along the way, our user testing validated a lot and shed light on a lot of small details that led to a polished product upon launch. We were lucky enough to have a group of passionate users that were willing to help us at every step. The only thing I would have done differently is try to recruit more new users of our Slack community during research because the insights we gained from their feedback proved to be the most important.
Project impact
The Happs Virtual Newsroom product would eventually serve as a pivotal part of our pitch to raise a post-seed round of funding. In June of 2021 Happs successfully raised a round of $4.7 million.
UI DESIGN • BRAND IDENTITY • RESEARCH
UI Design explorations for the brand refresh of the Facebook Portal device.
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UX/UI DESIGN
Partnership with Doritos and Mountain Dew for a mobile, AR style scavenger hunt game.
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