Challenge

As an online community, Juejin greatly relies on user-created content.

📈 On our business side, the objective is more than obvious:

We want more user-created content of better quality & more newly-published content everyday.
We want more content creators and higher DAU.

🤔 As a designer, the challenge to me is rather ambiguous:

The scope is too broad! How can I reframe and narrow down the design challenge?
The goal is too vague! How can I find potential directions and feasible actions?

Instead of spinning around in ambiguity, I started user research and reframed the problem into more concrete HMW statements:

More details about defining the design challenge in Discover below!

Final Solution

📢 Take a sneak peek at how we reached our goals from several perspectives!

Homepage

Providing a quick entrance for frequently-visited features during the content-creating process and an overview of all the important information

Content Center

User Scenario: After publishing or before creating, content creators need to modify the published assets, group certain contents of the same topic, resume previous drafts for future creation, etc.
Solution: A workspace providing several management tools that enable users to modify, reorganize, and customize their assets.
Pain Points Solved: Efficiency and flexibility for content management! ✌️

Data Center

User Scenario: After publishing the content, users care about how people like and react to it. They also want to see their growth in both skills & platform influence. That affects their motivation for contributing the content next time.
Solution: Comprehensive data & diagrams that support the retrospections while visualizing users' achievements & impact and the community engagement.
Pain Points Solved: Stronger encouragement & the sense of a more energetic community! 🏠

Event Center

User Scenario: Users need strong motivation and struggle to decide the themes and topcis before content creating.
Solution: Well-organized platform events & campaigns that hint at trending topics and reward the participants with gifts & Juejin souvenirs.
Pain Points Solved: Stronger incentives, better guidance, & more rewards! 🎁

Product Strategy

Converging cross-functional efforts on both short-term actions & long-term roadmaps

Together with PMs, marketing teams, community operators, and engineers, I developed the cross-functional system that incentivizes & facilitates users through each content-creating stage. In addition to developing the 0-t0-1 Creator Center and improving exisiting features, it also involved a future gamification system for Juejin, community management, external collaboration, etc.
Please contact me if you're interested in knowing more : D

Discover

🎯 How I navigated through ambiguity and drove the design forward by reframing the challenge

Standing in users’ shoes, I questioned myself:
❤️ Why would a user want to become a content creator?
🤝 What would provoke or hinder their content-creating process?
These questions guided me through the following research process.

Core User Interviews

I interviewed 6 core users with product managers.
I discovered that users’ feelings changed and developed during different content-creating phases.

More specifically, user feelings revolved around 2 main aspects–motivation and execution–throughout all three stages, requiring different actions to address each phase’s needs.
‍

Key Insights

Diving deep into the interviews, I discovered key features that would affect users’ motivation and executive experience.

‍

Understanding the Gap

🔍 How I found potential solutions by analyzing the gap between touchpoints and user expectations

We then used the interview findings as metrics to evaluate what the product failed to achieve. I mapped out the user voices throughout the content-creating process and sorted out current touchpoints that were relevant to each user goal.
I then analyzed the gaps between those touchpoints and user expectations, categorizing them into 3 types. The gaps helped me brainstorm with the team to come up with several ideas that might fill the gap.

Above is the keyword version of the User Journey & Gap Analysis
Click here to see the complete version : D

Ideate

🧭 How I navigated through the maze of a great many possible actions

These ideas and potential actions excited us! However, we were lost again in front of the huge amount of thoughts. It was not feasible to turn each one of them into reality all at once.

Research-driven Evaluation

Again, I reached out to the users. And this time, the stakeholders were also invited.

Collaborating with the product managers, I retrieved 244 online surveys from users and held 3 internal meetings with the team, evaluating these ideas from several aspects. After merging similar and relevant actions into integrated features, I then used the research findings as metrics to weigh these actions based on impact and feasibility.

‍

On the Product Level

While iterating on existing features such as the Editor and Feeds, I was responsible for developing the 0-to-1 Content Creator feature. Meanwhile, I also designed the Columns (a P2 new feature) to enable users to personalize their personal channels and attract more readers to subscribe.

I organized the Information Architecture that structured all the important features as well as detailed information and interactions. While arranging the IA and marking up the launching phases, I also considered the consistency of user experience and completeness of each user flow.

‍

On the Team Level

The Creator Center involved rather complex features and long-term strategies. It was lucky for me because I got the chance to collaborate with almost every individual working on Juejin.
In addition to understanding the users, I also tried to understand my teammates. What did they want to achieve? Why did they focus on various aspects and hold different perspectives? How could I help them accomplish the goals more efficiently and enjoyfully?

Refine

🤔 How I evolved the design through empathy and critique

Moving from information architecture to lo-fi wireframes and hi-fi interfaces, I also refined the design several times by conducting usability testing and arranging internal critique meetings. Among all the iterations, I found 3 decisions that inspired me most.

📺 Present our features to users—don’t wait for them to discover

The homepage of the Creator Center displayed 3 key features and quick entrances. Usability testing showed that the part that exceeded the first screen hardly ever caught users’ attention. We then weighed different solutions based on both user feedback and internal strategies.

🌇 Understand the scenarios, not the devices

While users’ content-creating process is mainly on desktop, adapting the features on our mobile app was also important to reach the goal. While designing the mobile wireframes and interfaces accordingly, I re-examined user pain points and how they’d interact with our product through research & user feedback. I learned that beyond developing responsive designs, designing on different devices is designing for distinct scenarios.

🌠 Empty states are important opportunities

During internal testing and design walkthrough, I discovered that there were several pages that involved empty states. Dealing with these blank areas, I recognized that they were not only special contexts we need to consider. They also indicated certain user scenarios that when responded to thoughtfully, we could fill the gap between their pain points and expectations.

Impact 🎉

We made it!!! Within 2 months of launching the Creator Center, we increased the number of content creators by 42.4% and increased daily newly-published content by 80.6%.

But we made impact more than on the business side. Behind the data was the way users interacted with the product and the community. The growth in numbers revealed how we refreshed and energized the way developers learn, share, and create their impact on our platform.

Takeaways

Thrive in ambiguity 🌤

From this project, I learned how to rephrase the problem and frame the scope through research and evaluation. Going wide and then narrowing down, I explored varied forms of touchpoints and actions before moving straight to the design details. Where the challenge is vague, there are more opportunities and surprises await! An ambiguous situation gives me as a designer the chance to find my own voice and direction through user research.

Think beyond a designer’s role 🎩

Collaborating in an interdisciplinary environment, I learned that a well-operated product is more than its interfaces or interactions—it requires a whole team’s effort both at the frontstage & backstage. As a designer, I collaborated with other teams where I applied very different perspectives that I learned from them. I learned that it’s important to retain flexibility while still keeping my expertise. I’m excited to wear more different hats in the future!

To know more about Juejin's content-creating lifecycle and my internship experience, click here! 😃

Campus...only for students?

How might we create a center at the gate that can help different people find the space and atmosphere comfortable to them?

This is some text inside of a div block. And inside of a div block. This is some text inside of a div block. This is some text inside of a div block.

Image Title

This is some text inside of a div block.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.