Narrative

I was brought on to Fligoo as a Creative Director consultant. They had a goal to launch a brand new product  within 6 months. This included design, testing, development and all marketing assets being created.

The basic concept of the app is as follows: After connecting your Facebook account to the app, it would scrub through your posts, photos, likes, groups you are in, and events you’ve attended to gather insight on things you’re interested in. The algorithm then suggests different types of content such as articles,  events, photos and videos to you.

I was responsible for not only the design of the app, but the creative direction of the overall brand including logos, colors, and social media strategy.

Strategy and kickoff

Initially I met with all of the developers to understand their algorithm. Fligoo was a technology company, but no consumer facing product to surface their tech. First we needed to define our audience and that would determine the path we take.

‍First we needed to identify our audience and market to go after. I worked alongside two market researchers to gather data and help define who we are designing for. Working with the CEO, CMO and our marketing researchers, we decided to develop a product that will capture the millennial market. This was by far the largest market and highest users of social media

One characteristic of millennials is that they are always on the go, attending parties, going to school, work, etc, and they want to consume information in the shortest, most concise way as possible. Social media exploded on mobile so we were going to tackle that platform first, and potentially expand to a desktop offering in the future.

WIreframing / Proof of concept

Created basic wireframes to get an understanding of how the app might look or behave. Also to give the developers and idea of the direction the design was taking to get a head start on the front end development.

Mobile prototype and user testing

I built a fully fledge prototype to get initial reactions from users. We tested things like app layout, login mechanism, icons, name, etc. We did an unmoderated study with 100 participants through usertesting.com and then a moderated study with 10 participants to get more qualitative data.

Key insights

• Overall ease of navigation and UI was evaluated very favorably (Avg 4.6/5 n=110)
• The swipe mechanism at the top was only noticed by around 80% of the participants before prompting.
• Participants stated it was not clear how recent or current the content was. Consider adding a timestamp ("3 hours ago")
• Source was viewed as much more important than type.
• Several participants desired the ability to add certain content to their Pinterest boards.
• Ability to give negative feedback in addition to positive feedback was requested so users had more control over what was shown. (Thumbs down in addition to heart or favorite)
• In terms of the app icon, the Paper airplane app icon was nearly unanimously preferred by all participants. (86/110, n=110)
• And the MOST important feedback that we received was that a large amount of participants (approx. 30%) were hesitant to log in with Facebook and grant permission to their feed. It was mentioned that unless there were plenty of positive reviews, or the app was recommended as trustworthy by a friend, they would be hesitant to grant Facebook permissions. This was mitigate somewhat by our disclaimer that we would NEVER post to Facebook.

We also wanted to get a lot of feedback on the overall branding, not just in terms of design, but a company as a whole. Although Fligoo, was the original company behind the tech, we found that users did not associate that with any meaningful action or content. After all, it is a made up word. We wanted to find something that resonated on the emotional level with users. We threw a round of testing and the marketers went to work surveying customers and after some internal debate as to which final name to go with based on the research, we decided Freshfeed is the winner. Users associated this with content from their feed that is recent, current and they get it before anyone else. We needed to live up to this assumption.

Variations

Some of the other icons we tested. The plane with multiple colors was the winner as it showed it would "deliver" things to the user. We wanted to make it more in line with our brand, and felt the burgundy color really popped and grabbed the users attention.