0-1 Platform Build of NetBase Pro

Catherine Hicks

Graphic Designer

UX Designer

Product Designer

Figma

Sketch

Building of NetBase Pro Platform

Overview

NetBase, (now NetBase Quid) based in Santa Clara, CA, is the premium social intelligence solution that the most prominent brands and forward-thinking agencies trust to monitor, understand and engage with customers at the speed of social, providing social intelligence solutions that enable brands to publish, monitor, analyze and engage with customers in real-time.

What was the problem?

Difficult to use

The core enterprise product required weeks of training to fully understand how to use and implement

Low Adoption

Because the product was complicated, we were not selling as many licenses per sale as we would like

Outdated visualizations

Out-of-the-box Highcharts data visualizations that were not customized to the user's needs and experience

Our Hypothesis on how to fix it

If you build it (& make it easier) they will come . . .

If we built a product that used a smaller subset of the enterprise product functionality and made it easier to use, more people across an entire organization would be able to quickly obtain and use relevant social data to do their jobs without needing an analyst to build reports & run data for easy queries, thereby freeing their time to do more detailed work that moves the overall company in the right direction

So, we started with what we had

Current Inventory

Looked at analytics for all the different ways to slice data and how often it's accessed

Identify Trends

Pulled the top 500 most accessed features to do an in-depth analysis of the feasibility

Client Wishlist

Examine existing client wishlist to confirm trends and make sure we can fully meet client needs

Finalize Choices

Finalize list of data filters and features with engineering, marketing, and sales

... and then looked at what others were doing....

Competitive Analysis

We took a look at two of the top players in the SMB social media landscape to understand where our current deficiencies were that were illustrated in their strengths

.. and found what they were doing right...

Ease of onboarding

Competitors had self-service onboard

Ease of Upgrade

Competitors had self-service upgrade/downgrade

Meaningful Analytics

Easy to understand analytics

Modern Visualizations

Visualizations were in alignment with current web standards and user expectations

... and what we were not doing right ....

Too many Choices

The app has too many features, and is so specific that it requires a fair amount of training to use properly

Outdated

The app has an outdated UI and visualizations that don’t pop, therefore adding additional work to make the data palatable to current standards, which usually requires people to go out of our program to others

So we put together a Skunkworks project to explore what we could possibly do to enhance our product.

What is Skunkworks?

noun (usually lowercase) Also skunkworks, skunk·works [skuhngk-wurks] a phrase commonly used to describe a small and loosely structured team in an innovative undertaking, that is outside the normal research and development channels within an organization

Highlights

Development team from Taiwan in US office

Excited to try new visualizations and methodologies

Limited time together to explore options before team returned home

Tasks and Decisions

Decided to upgrade using new visualization engine (d3)

Explored all existing functionality from our inventory and came up with concepts

Collaborated real time in both code (d3) and design tools (sketch) to explore visualization language

Began exploring the concept of a “Super Lite” version of the existing product functionality

Concept: Super Lite

Super Lite was a very stripped down version of a report using existing data in our enterprise product without much change to the overall concepts

Where are people talking is key to understanding where the focus should be in terms of ad spend and interaction

what is the data?

what platforms?

who is saying it?

what are they saying?

Concept Feedback

Presented as both as an overview presentation and an interactive demo kiosParagraph 1Presented as both as an overview presentation and an interactive demo kiosk at our first ever user conferencek at our first ever user conference

We were on the right track but needed to understand user needs more clearly So..

....We talked to people!

8 Executives and Managers

6 had no experience on the platform

6 had some experience on the platform

10 daily platform users

.. and Here's what they said...

User Personas

While data had us build 5 personas, we built the product to the 3 active personas that had direct contact with our platform or were affected directly by the data from our system

Active Personas

Data Analyst

I get pulled in a lot of different directions. I need people to be able to do some stuff on their own or I will drown.

Executive

I have a lot to do but keeping up with social media is key to making sure I am in the loop on our social media efforts

Active Social Listener

Keeping up with social media is a large part of my job, and I am frequently checking the social pulse

Out of Scope Personas

Casual Explorer

I occasionally dip into social media stuff. Usually that's someone else on my team

Researcher

I fully know how to use the platform but sometimes its overkill for what I need to find out

Onto the build and its features!

Search Dashboard

Our starting point for finding the data you need

We have two entry points for searches - a general global search and saved Saved Searches

Allows enterprise user to share detailed search parameters that they’ve built in the enterprise product with a pro user

Data Dashboard

Where your Data Lives

Future Proofing To mitigate the idea of our existing product bloat we’ve broken up data into tabs for ease of future features Save/Export/Emailt Search All facilitate the idea that came from our interviews about easily sharing data with others

Cards

Our data visualizations for all kinds of data

New Data While we took some data from the existing platform, our interviews allowed us to look at our existing data visualizations in a new way and add new data sets Future Development While the cards were locked at launch, future development will allow you to select your own data to show on the cards and relocate them to any place on the grid that makes sense to you.

Beta

If you build it, will they come?

Who Tested

Existing Alpha users

People who were involved in our interviews

People from our top 5 clients

What did they test

Existing features built in Alpha

Any additions and enhancements built during beta

How we received feedback

Bi-weekly phone calls

existing user community forums

1:1 Feedback sessions

Monthly virtual user testing

3 multi day site visits

Feedback

Visualization feedback

Missing some key data people wanted

Some visualizations were not clear so they were reworked

User research and sites visits

Allowed to see it out in the wild

Showed us that additional additional features (like compare) would help people tremendously, even though they didn’t mention it explicitly

Community forums

Leveraged existing tools Allowed users to feel consistently heard

Post-Beta Addition: Compare

Is Coke better than Pepsi?

Why we added this

Found during visits and user testing that a lot of people were doing or were asked to make comparisons on a regular basis but we had no easy way in any product offering for that to occur

Functionality

Can compare up to 4 terms - any more was too hard to decipher

Can filter by any number or highlight just one in data table

Like this project

Was the sole designer in charge of designing and delivering NetBase Pro, transforming social intelligence analytics into a scalable, user-friendly platform fo

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Netbase Quid