summary
I led the revamp of the offers of Rock Content's Marketplace, where clients who needed content marketing services met freelancers who would understand their context and deliver pieces like e-books, blog posts, marketing e-mails and others. Initially, the marketplace offers would only cover written content, and we built the structure to make offers including social media posts including images possible.
Focus: Engagement, activation, sales, architecture and personalization
role & scope
Product Designer,
Marketplace client-side
I led research, prototyping, interaction and A/B testing, partnering with a team of product and engineering specialists to deliver the new structure.
the challenge
Understanding user needs and designing a structure that worked for both client and talent-side, so that the requirements were feasible for the talent doing the work and the client's expectations were correctly set when the order was made.
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marketplace: client needs meets talent
In 2022, Rock Content was the biggest company focused in content marketing and delivering solutions for marketing companies in Brazil and Mexico. It had just expanded to the US and Canada by buying ION Interactive, a company that optimizes workflows, and adapting its products to work in a different country.
One of its services was a marketplace in which clients in need of written content would choose what type of content they wanted — blog posts, e-books, social media planning, etc. — and a talent from Rock Content's pool would take that offer and deliver what the client needed. For that to work, we needed to make sure the structure of the order gave the talent all the information they needed to produce the content, while also ensuring the client had the right expectations for the outcome.
Rock Content's marketplace: everyone could commission a marketing piece of their own
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we want to show, not tell
Even though the marketplace clients were satisfied with the current offers, they wanted to commission social media content, where they generated more leads. Ones with small businesses needed content primarily for social media, since it was the main channel for them to communicate and engage with their public.
We were planning on including an offer for social media posts, but didn't include the option to include visuals. We had no idea of how the client-talent interaction and the reworks would work when this variant was included in the offer — what were the actual points that needed addressing?
This is when I teamed up with the talent-side designer to figure what were our main doubts.
our base questions
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What were the client's expectations for the social media posts? What they understood as a fair, complete offer?
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In what social network were they most active and generated more leads?
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How was the talents' process — both content writers and designers — to produce this type of piece? What was a fair number of iterations and timeframe?
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looking for answers
Then, the research process started: I made a competitive analysis of other platforms that offered this type of service, put a research form on the main page with our questions to the clients, and scheduled interviews with clients from various segments to collect qualitative and quantitative data.
As I was working on the client-side, my designer teammate from the talent-side was doing research and interviews focused on the definitions needed by the talents and what was a fair payment and timeframe.
To consolidate the data we collected from the interviews, we used the atomic research method, crossing what made sense between who was requesting and who was producing the content. We also used a CSD matrix, which helped us understand if we had all the essential information to start the offer definitions.
Users asked mostly for posts combining content and images/videos, and feed images were the priority between those
After matching the quantitative data to the competitive analysis and user interviews, the team realized that the demand for this type of content was, in fact, really high. Then, we finally defined what social networks we would cover: Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.
The talent interviews helped us with the essential requirements for the talents to turn projects into reality. Since the client and talent didn't have a direct interaction in the platform, the briefing needed to be structured in a way that covered all the important points for them to start working on the pieces, as straight-foward as possible.
We also defined which would be the production flow for the social media posts, with separate steps for design and content.
Talents and clients communicated punctually through predefined steps: the piece outline and change requests
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getting down to it
With the definitions in hand and no more doubts, we started prototyping — I focused on the client-side of the offer and my design partner on the talent-side, always touching bases.
Since the offer briefings was standardized, just a few elements were made from scratch; our main focus was the UX writing. For complex items, we used tooltips to provide further information for the user to fill throughout the flow.
The design part was set in a simple way: we provided template-like examples of how the images should be, and the client could choose between them. The images wouldn't be exactly the same, but the expectations were well aligned for both the requester and the talent.
I also made a new card for the Marketplace main page, and the content explaining the offer and the process of making the marketing piece, since this was the first time we had two talents working on an offer — a content writer and a designer.
In 3 months, the new offer was live on the site!
After choosing an offer, the client fills a form with their knowledge area, their brand assets and how they wanted their post images to look like
what was the impact?
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Marketplace's CSAT increased in 30% when compared to the previous semester. After the launch, users were really satisfied to have been heard.
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60% of our users already bought an offer in the first month. It was a good increase for the company's revenue and showed us that the demand was real.
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We had an increase of 14% in our DAU. Those small business owners that were interested in this solution started accessing the platform more frequently to check their offers and the production flow.
Having based the process strongly on research was a great foundation for this project; it helped not only getting good results, but making our customers feel heard and seen.
Ironically (or not?), content was also a big part of this delivery — we were the translators between the clients and the talents, and they needed to understand each other. As an advocate for UX writing, I made sure everything was making sense not only to us, but for the real users, avoiding technical jargon and embracing common terms that our users were used to.
One of the things I learned was that keeping a perception journal of the interviews helped a lot when consolidating all that data — specially when we das a lot of work and little time to go back and rewatch them one by one.