My Role: Lead Product Designer

Since its introduction in 2017, the "Product for Post" strategy has been a fundamental approach for brands to collaborate with influencers. Customized product offerings to creators foster authentic partnerships between brands and influencers and help connect with their audiences. To enhance Pixlee TurnTo's creator platform and attract more customers, implementing a feature that allows easy product gifting and shipment tracking within their CRM could be a game-changer, especially for brands using manual processes or existing influencer platforms. Addressing the diverse needs of their expansive customer base would streamline operations and potentially attract more market share.

Give brands and their Influencer managers a way to easily send free product to their Influencers via the CRM, allowing them to track shipment, fulfillment, costs, etc. as part of a campaign requirements.

We set out to gather customer insights by doing 1:1 interviews with each customer that has expressed interest in this feature and have needs and pain points in their current workflow.

Understand current influencer engagement methods.

Explore the structure of their campaigns with creators.

Identify different tiers of influencers and their varying engagements.

Determine if multiple teams work with influencers and how they manage them.

Discover the tools used for working with influencers and reasons for multiple tools.

Assess how product gifts to influencers are managed and tracked.

Gather feedback on the process of sending product gifts.

Inquire about the source of products sent to influencers and the selection process.

Check if Shopify is used to track fulfillment and shipping for influencer gifts.

Learn the preferred method of paying influencers (directly or through the service).

Understand how tax forms are managed in influencer payments.

Inquire about handling payer disputes.

Discover if they collaborate with talent agencies.

Explore the role of affiliate links/LTK in gifting and payments for influencers.

After completing the user interviews, we gained insights into various methods brands used to gift free products and improved our understanding of their workflows. Based on this information, we initiated the process of scoping the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for this feature. It became clear that our scope would be offering product seeding, which is essentially free product as a form of compensation for completing brand defined campaign requirements.

We landed on 3 flows as design requirements

Brands sending gifts through control panel: The brand needs to be able to integrate their Shopify store to Pixlee and easily add free products to their campaign. - They can only select parent SKU's for products, this could get technically complicated since we learned alot of pixlee accounts handle their product SKU's very differently. So, we decided it's not a problem in scope for this MVP.

Creators selecting products through pixlee.me: The creator needs to have an authorized pixlee.me account and has to have accepted the campaign before selecting the products.

Submit and track orders in control panel/Shopify: The brand should be able to do a final check on the order before submitting to Shopify.

Below are some screens from the pixlee.me flow from the initial design to the final ones we felt confident with after user testing.

Below are some of the initial design screens and final designed screens of the pixlee control panel and how the brand sets up the campaign products.

We should always be scoping for user testing between design iterations to test and validate our initial assumptions. This should be baked into the project timeline. We found during this project we had already assigned developers to kick off the work before we had ensured our designs were thoroughly tested. I needed to delay the timeline we had initially scoped since I wanted to ensure the experience I designed for was successful!

I learnt through this project about working with partner API's, knowing how to navigate asking technical questions that impact decisions on the UX.

Top customers have reviewed their experience of this feature post launch and have all said It is wonderfully easy to use.

increasing user onboarding to creators by 20%.

Also increased avg. number of influencers added to campaigns run by brands in Pixlee.