CommSpot
Overview
Before beginning my graduate school program, I participated in an introductory user experience (UX) bootcamp.
For the bootcamp, I did competitive analysis, created a user persona and user journey, and developed an interactive prototype for a company’s internal content hub.
I had firsthand knowledge of the user journey because I was in the target user group (communication professionals). However, doing this project taught me that in-depth audience research is necessary to create effective, user-centered products.
Context
Before beginning graduate school, I developed CommSpot as an individual project for a bootcamp project.
Content creators at my previous company were responsible for creating a variety of products (e.g., videos, webinars, infographics) across several topics including health, education, and criminal justice.
Creators may not have experience creating a particular product or reaching a particular audience.
While there are existing websites to support content creators, these websites only provide some of the information that would help my company’s content creators.
Competitive Analysis
CommSpot: A Potential Solution
I developed CommSpot, a communications hub that includes relevant resources for my previous company’s content creators.
Resources on CommSpot could include the following:
Templates for creating different types of content (e.g., infographics)
Best practices, curated from reputable sources, to make products relevant and engaging
Blog posts written for content creators, by content creators — sharing lessons learned and advice based on previous projects
User Persona
Who Are The End Users?
CommSpot was intended for content creators for my previous company.
The user persona represents the content creator audience:
The majority of content creators at my previous company are women between their mid-20s and late 30s. This means content creators generally have prior experience in the communications world, but they may not be familiar with specific products or topics.
My previous company is a contractor for federal and state clients, focusing primarily on health and education projects.
The end users (content creators at my previous company) usually create multiple types of products.
For example, in my user persona, Taylor works on newsletters, social media, webinars and infographics.
Content creators may be very knowledgable about some products, but may be new to creating other products.
Content creators can eventually develop products using the current resources that exist. However, the effort to search multiple websites takes away from the creator’s time to fine-tune the product.
User Journey
CommSpot Homepage
The homepage allows users to find relevant resources in several ways:
Choosing an intended product (e.g., webinars) — the site will then walk the user through relevant resources
Browsing different types of resources (e.g., templates)
Searching for resources at the top
Asking the CommSpot team for help
CommSpot Navigation
The Templates and Best Practices menu options also allow the user to choose the relevant product, so they can find the most useful information more quickly.
Templates Page
The templates page shows a preview of each template. Users can scroll over to see additional options.
Best Practices Page
Once a user selects the type of product, the site will walk the user through steps of the creation process, also sharing reputable external resources for more information.
For example, the videos page starts with helping the user identify their primary audience, which will inform the content and format of the intended video.
Blog Page
Users can filter blog posts by topic.
Some topics cover one particular type of product (for example, Social Media Posts). Other topics are cross-cutting themes that may apply to multiple products (for example, Data Visualization could apply to infographics, presentations, and more).
Contact Us Page
If users cannot find the information they seek, they can send a question to the CommSpot team.
The contact form asks users to identify their division within the company. This helps the CommSpot team direct the question to someone who has experience in that particular topic area.
Lessons Learned
This challenge reinforced the importance of understanding one’s user base. In this case, my target users work in a specific field and need domain-relevant resources.
I had personal knowledge of the user’s needs and frustrations because I have worked in communications roles previously.
However, if I were building out this idea further, I would also interview other communication professionals from my previous company. They might have perspectives or needs that I could not anticipate from my own experiences.
I developed my strength and confidence in using prototyping software. I used Balsamiq for the CommSpot prototype. Using Balsamiq reinforced the importance of being detail-oriented, especially when mapping interactions between pages.
Since completing this prototype, I have also used Axure and Figma for prototyping.