Mayple

Jan 2018 – Present

Project Overview

Mayple is a digital marketing hybrid solution of technology & human touch. Mayple helps businesses and empowers freelance marketers.

My main challenge at Mayple is to transfer experience SMBs had with physical marketing agencies into digital product. Making it more transparent, seamless and accessible.

My role

UI/UX Designer

User Research, Prototyping & Testing, UI Design

Mayple marketing: branding, website design and development, marketing materials design.

My story at Mayple

Mayple’s mission is to provide SMBs with access to top talents in digital marketing and to empower freelancers and provide them with security and flexibility that modern independent workers lack.

I began my quest there in January 2018 as one of the first employees shortly after the startup was founded in 2017. I support design across every aspect of our business and I’m responsible for all of its aspects from UI/UX to marketing.

Working for an early stage startup is challenging, and here are the key points I helped to achieve across the company:

Product — establishing a culture where hypotheses have to be validated through user tests, and involving people from different departments in the product shaping process.
Design — transferring our brand into visual language and creating custom UI kit based on MUI DS. Creating a library of design components that offer rapid prototyping and precise user testing.
Development — establishing a solid design development process before the final design is achieved: detailed product requirement documents, involving developers in product definition at early stages. And after the final design, too: close cooperation on necessary tradeoffs and design QA.

Collecting ideas

After my first year at Mayple and after we’d shipped our redesign for the existing POC system, we decided to take a broader approach and look at the user’s journey from a wider perspective. To energize this process, I conducted a Design Sprint workshop with the team that included our members from all Mayple departments — business, development, marketing and customer success.

Solutions from workshop participants and voting

This process was very effective in revealing the weak parts in our customer’s journey and possible opportunities for us to improve it. We came up with a few goals we had to achieve through a deep redesign of the onboarding process:

Our Brief, which is essentially onboarding to our platform, has to be simple to support inexperienced clients, but also reassure them that the information we get from the client will be significant for locating the best freelance marketer for their new project.
It was very important for the business to emphasize Mayple’s role in this relationship and to distinguish us from both digital agencies and marketplaces.
The new redesign should properly support various scopes of new services Mayple plans to provide.

Prototyping the solution

In order to achieve a holistic solution, I began with reviewing the current state of information architecture within Mayple along with observations of user behaviour in FullStory recordings. With different client staging and when some parts of the system suddenly became irrelevant after the user moved forward, it was particularly challenging to achieve consistency in the UI.

Mayple’s platform information structure (various iterations)

User observation was supportive of my hypothesis that the information architecture required a significant restructuring. Users were disoriented after performing a few actions, and connections between the stages were unclear. My solution was to arrange only the high level elements on the main navigation panel, rather than user stages within the journey. We also implemented a home dashboard to serve as a place where the user can come back in case of uncertainty and get a high-level view on their project.

Old navigation and home screen (for one stage only)

New navigation and universal home screen

Validating ideas

In order to validate our ideas and solutions, I created a master prototype that included the whole onboarding process: not only the path that the business expects from the client to achieve fast acquisition, but also various aspects and features of Mayple platform to validate that they fit into the new information architecture and UI.

Mayple master prototype

Our CEO and I conducted dozens of deep user tests with our primary target audiences and explored different variations of onboarding and other aspects of the Mayple platform. Some hypotheses, such as a live chat with a bot after a brief completion, weren't successful; others, like a guided product tour, proved to be quite effective (we also saw later in Fullstory recordings from our clients that a short product tour we made had a hight completion rate). During the user test and the following usability test with Maze.design, I also made multiple small UX improvements.

Mayple Brief — a module that helps us deeply understand the client’s needs, made in a very interactive manner

Mayple Experts — a module that represents the recommended talents for the client's project

Keep learning

Product development is a constant process and requires constant monitoring which we go through after releasing each redesign version. We significantly improved customer engagement with the platform, got positive feedback on the new Brief and Monitoring features. Usability metrics were also improved by the new information architecture.

One of the aspects that wasn't so successful, our relatively long sales cycle, didn't change much. The reason is that with users tests, we weren't able to imitate real timeframes between the key actions, which can last up to a couple of days.

Some takeaways from this project:

Involve people with different levels of competence from the beginning
Be aware of user tests limitations
Prototypes for tests with real users should have the highest possible fidelity

Mayple

My story at Mayple

Collecting ideas

Prototyping the solution

Validating ideas

Keep learning

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alexey@fastmail.com

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