Advocacy is the best way to spread the word about brands. It is an extension of that age-old tactic: word-of-mouth marketing employed  to promote brands through their already existing loyalist of employees or customers. The best part is, this medium is cheap to engage yet very productive.

Together with our product managers and engineers, I worked on workflows that help users take actions efficiently to solve issues and improve their way of managing businesses using apvocate.

In addition, I’ve been working on the overall experience (onboarding; notifications; loading, error and empty states etc.), and contributing to the design system.

We don’t have a dedicated user researcher on the team, so I’ve also been pairing with the product team to conduct user studies and leveraging user insights to inform designs.

I work with the multi-functional team in understanding our users and shaping the product to make useful information easily accessible, create intuitive workflows, reduce anxiety, ensure flexibility, provide just-enough guidance, and eventually - build trust and help our users feel more accomplished when interacting with the product.

Decline of organic reach: Between January and July 2016, publishers saw a 52% decline in organic reach on Facebook.

High sales Cycle: high marketing efforts employed to generate and maintain interest of the prospective customer. Then next they face the selling process to engage and convert a potential buyer into a customer.

Absence of an effective centralized platform for brand advocacy: Inefficient digital platform to manage, grow and engage brand advocates in activities and brand promotion campaign within a central space.

Apvocate helps to recruit brand’s loyal advocates to share marketing content to a wider and more likely to engage audience.

Brands can easily build a marketing plan/Campaign Strategy with Apvocate which ensures the entire advocate team is working toward a shared goal.

Apvocate Tracks and Measures the Success of brands’ marketing plan/campaign. This provides detailed report and insights of the success of the plan.

The process varies depending on the specific problems we are trying to solve, but I always try and engage with users, product stakeholders and engineers along the way.

Understand the context and basic requirements from product managers.

Ask questions to figure out the What, Why, What-if and How.

Reach out to users to learn about their current workflows and pain points, map out use cases and scenarios. Circle back with product managers on user input, call out what’s missing from the initial requirements. Define problems, users, goals and metrics together.

Explore design options, brainstorm with PMs and engineers. For workflow-heavy features, come up with wireframes and flowcharts driven by use cases; Optimize for clarity and actionable insights.

Build prototypes to show end-to-end ows or micro-interactions.

Run critiques with the design team and present designs to product stakeholders along the way to get feedback from different angles.

Share works-in-progress with engineers to nd better and more feasible options.

Share designs with users, let them play with the prototypes, get user feedback and iterate.

Try and land on options that fulfill optimal value for users, business, and engineering.

Work with engineers on edge cases, error states, loading & empty states etc.

Make sure designs are consistent with the design system.

Draw illustrations or make animations to add human touch.

Provide assets and specs. QA and work with engineers on xes and tweaks.

After launching the feature, track usage metrics and user feedback, work with PMs to define enhancements and opportunities, come up with improved designs and work with engineers to implement them.

TEAM

1 Product Managers, front-end and back-end engineer and me

MY ROLE

Interaction design, user research,  visual design, illustration

TOOLS

XD, Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop

TIME

2018.3 - Present