The ViralMango Creator Marketplace is a platform where nano and micro creators can discover and participate in brand campaigns, with each campaign receiving up to 500 applications per day. It's a place where content, nano/micro influencers can collaborate with brands and build long-term partnerships.

At first, I supported and improved the old platform design by enhancing usability and fixing UX issues. Over time, I took the lead designer on designing a new, more scalable and user-friendly version of the platform, while continuing to support and maintain the design of the old platform to time switching to the new one.

Brand-Influencer communication gaps

Out-platform collaboration

Brand-creator right matchmaking

To validate the new design direction for the ViralMango Creator Marketplace, I conducted a structured competitor UX audit focused on key competitors.

Objective: Understand how other platforms are structured: onboard brands, the campaign creation process, management, communication, and campaign tracking.

Identified Key Competitors

Mapped User Flows

Categorized Screens

Compared UX Decisions

Synthesized Insights

Through our competitor research and internal UX review, we detect two major issues:

Marketplace Poor Experience: Our current creator marketplace had usability challenges that made onboarding, search campaigns, and application tracking especially challenging in the "Content Creation in Progress" status.

Brand–Influencer Communication Gap: A recurring challenge across both our platform and competitors is the lack of reliable communication between brands and influencers. For example, brands often reach out to creators but receive no response. This isn't just a product-specific issue; it’s a market problem that most platforms struggle to solve.

Collaboration Outside the Platform: We discovered that many brands and creators move their communication and deals to social platforms (e.g., Instagram DMs), bypassing the platform entirely. It creates serious risks for us: "Loss of control and visibility", "Missed transactions", "Broken campaign workflows", "Decreased platform value".

Despite efforts to solve this problem and emphasizing in-platform communication, behavior did not change significantly. This insight pushed us to reconsider how we approach engagement and retention, not just through features, but through behavioral design and trust mechanisms.

I was tasked with improving the brand campaign creation process to make it more intuitive, efficient, and aligned with user expectations. I have redesigned the campaign management flow and started usability testing on real users(brands) see the Figma link below.

The old system had a poor structure and visibility across campaign stages. Brands often got lost in the process:

No clear view of who applied, who was approved, and who completed deliverables

Poor tracking of influencer progress (from "Applied" to "Published")

Messaging, approvals, and payments were scattered across different views

Brands were managing campaigns manually

We reimagined campaign management as a structured pipeline, giving brands clarity at every stage of their collaboration with creators. One-click actions to approve, reject, or move creators forward. I led the new design, ensuring it was:

Clear stages like Applied → Approved → In Progress → Published → Paid

Bulk actions, filters, and smart status indicators to reduce manual work

Integrated communication tools with reminders and message status tracking

Easy access to content previews, creator profiles, and status history

Clear notifications when creators miss deadlines or fail to deliver

A kanban-style progress view to track each creator across stages

One-click actions to approve, reject, or move creators forward

Integrated message threads per creator

Visual indicators for content delivery, payment status, and time left

A scalable system that works across campaign sizes, from 5 to 500 creators

A 30% faster brand onboarding to campaign launch time

Clearer visibility into creator deliverables and campaign progress

Higher brand satisfaction and lower support overhead

A foundation for future automations

The old version was created by Tailwind CSS. Then we decided to create it using new technologies like React and utilize the Design System. Our Design System was Ant Design.

I initiated the process of defining a structured UI kit, building on top of Ant Design, to bring consistency, improve handoffs between design and development, and align visuals across the product.

After user insights and data analysis, we decided to change the marketplace page. We made changes step by step.

We define that our users don't connect their Instagram accounts and categories. This was important for us to automate matching campaigns and for the brands to filter them out by socials and categories. Then we made the solution: For the new users, we implemented the onboarding checklist with tasks "Connect Instagram", and Select Categories.

There were many technology blocks because the main product is built on Tailwind CSS, and the design team had problems working with components and making global changes on the campaign management system. After the same changes, we decided to redesign the old product: phase by phase

We redesigned the flow by flow on the creator side. The old version was supported, but the new version has replaced it step by step.

In competitive analysis, we understand that most marketplaces are created for desktop-first. After a lot of user testing and interviews, and our data analysis, we created the new version of the mobile-first creator marketplace design.

We created the new onboarding, which showed a 20% performance. We understood that we made the right decision to change it to a new technology to increase our marketplace experience and open new opportunities for our team to grow the product.

Most brands can't find the right creators for their campaigns.

Most of the creators don't respond to the brand's deals and can't finish their tasks by the correct deadline.