UX Designer
UX Designer
In House, Product Design
When I was doing product design at Moz, a marketing analytics start-up, our engineering team had developed a cutting edge tool that collected data on the web through RSS feeds, primarily blog posts and news articles. Our customers – online marketers – were very interested in this fresh data as they could use it to analyze where their brands were being mentioned.
Being a technology-driven product we had two big challenges facing us:
CONTENT: How best do we share large amounts of data in a way that our customers will find useful?
QUALITY: How can our customers be sure that the quality of the data is good?
My role was to determine how to best share this data with our customers, including designing the user interface and determining the types of data to display. I collaborated with customers and subject matter experts in research and usability testing, not only to confirm that we were focused on the right set of features, but also that the tool was as useful as intended.
CONTENT
Online marketers tend to be very detail-oriented in their work and like to drill down into sources, so we included a link to the source in our results. This allowed us to limit the number of actual fields to display in the UI per post/article, keeping the view as clean as possible.
To maintain a consistent look and feel across all Moz products we used Highcharts for interactive graphing. It allowed our users to look at up to 10 result sets at once and toggle them on/off for comparison viewing.
QUALITY
Moz had previously developed several industry-trusted metrics for evaluating websites. In order to give our customers confidence that we were providing valuable data our scientists developed an algorithm to determine the authority of a feed. Along with displaying this metric, we used it to filter the list of data we displayed to the customer.
In addition, we created an interactive flag in the UI that allowed users to give us feedback on a particular post/article.
Engaging our customers and subject matter experts throughout the design process allowed us to ship a stellar product out the gate. Once launched, not only did we get overwhelmingly positive responses from our existing customers, but we also saw new sign-ups more than double that month.
Fresh Web Explorer has since become a favorite among online marketers, assisting them with link building, reputation management and competitive intelligence in an easy-to-use experience.