Creating access to international audiences like never before
Aview International is a Toronto based startup that connects content creators to their international audiences by offering a suite of tools that translates, dubs, repurposes, and distributes their content across multi-lingual channels.
I joined Aview as a UI/UX Designer as one of two designers in a company with 3 engineers, where shortly after I would be the sole designer for the whole company. I support design across every aspect of the businesses and lead all things UI and UX including the product side and the website.
I’ve grown immensely over the past year, some key achievements of which I have listed below:
Redesigning the company website. This has helped the company reestablish our branding with our new services that we are continuing to develop.
Establishing a design system. This has helped maintain consistency in the look and feel across different parts of the platform.
Implementing a design process. This has helped our team establish more structure with how we work and allows other teams to follow along with the process of product development.
A simple but effective process
The design process at Aview is somewhat unorthodox, considering that we are a relatively young startup. Being that we are such a small team, we are able to move quickly and efficiently in terms of communication and collaboration.
Research
Initially I research common practices for this specific use case scenario for whatever new feature or user flow we are implementing.
Define
I then define what exactly the user pain points are and how it can be solved while still adhering to business needs.
Ideate
I then narrow down the scope of which design will most effectively accomplish the goals of the feature we are implementing.
Implement
I then refine the solution I have decided will best solve the paint point we are attempting to solve.
Understanding a very particular set of users
Our core user base were content creators. And it turns out they can be quite cynical and unwilling to trust companies and services that request access to their personal content and intellectual property.
Unfortunately, I was unable to talk to any current users of our platform, being that the product was not created yet and the amount of current users available to me was severely limited.
So the closest resource I had to understanding user needs was my cofounder, who was well versed in what content creator pain points and desires were in the context of the services we offered as a company.
I conducted interviews with stakeholders to understand what were the businesses requirements of the product, as well as with the engineers to understand what were the technical limitations of the project.
My interviews encompassed:
Empathy. Understanding user goals and needs.
Balance. Determining how I could design for these pain points while adhering to business requirements.
Ease of use. Uncovering ways to create a platform that would reduce friction with our users when initially learning to use the platform.
So what do content creators care about?
From my conversations with my co-founders, I learned that our targeted user base (content creators) tend to value these things the most:
Time and efficiency
Quick, easy, and relevant services that will swiftly help their content grow and reach the right audiences
Trust and reliability
Creators are skeptical of giving access to any of their content because it is directly related to their income
Accuracy and personalization
They strive to ensure their content is authentic to their audiences because that is the core of their success
I would make sure to prioritize these three issues the most when designing the platform, to ensure I solved creator’s most frequent problems.
What I found - Competitors are lacking
In order to create a platform that rose above competitors and stood out as a superior option to users, I did a competitive audit where I analyzed competitor services and how our own services competed with them.
Some issues with competitor services would be the following:
Inaccuracy. Innacurate and lacking personlization features.
Time consuming. Can be very time consuming spending time looking for and validating quality translation services, as well as waiting for results to arrive.
Cost. Even if the other services are of quality, they can be expensive.
A bird's eye view of the product as a whole
I created an Information Architecture to organize the layout of the dashboard before designing in order to get a grasp of the scale and scope of the platform before designing anything.
This allowed me to understand the project as a whole and how everything would be connected and work together.
Ideating on the philosophy of "as few clicks as possible" with wireframes
During a conversation had with one of my co-founders, he emphasized the philosophy of “as few clicks as possible” to achieve the desired goal.
Based on that mantra and problems identified above, I worked towards solving these pain points and business requirements by coming up with potential solutions:
Efficiency. Reducing the number of steps to minimize time to completion.
Familiarity. Taking inspiration from other familiar services to reduce the learning curve for our own platform.
Simplicity. Placing the most important information front and center to the user to reduce complications with completing main user tasks.
I mocked up some basic wireframes to gather feedback from engineering and stakeholders on the overall structure and layout of the main user flow. This involved establishing the general layout of components and visual hierarchy for the home page of the dashboard platform.During a conversation had with one of my co-founders, he emphasized the philosophy of “as few clicks as possible” to achieve the desired goal.
Crafting the Aview experience
There was already somewhat of a branding guideline provided to me when I first started at Aview. So based on that I created a design system with similar elements for the dashboard design elements to ensure consistency and efficiency for the design process and development process.
Bringing it all together
With a combination of the branding guidelines I created along with collaboration and input from the engineering team and by co-founders, I arrived at these high fidelity mockups for the main flow of the dashboard platform.
I chose to stick with primarily dark mode because it aligned with the company’s branding and messaging the most compared to light mode. It was also a emphasized by stakeholders to go with dark mode.
Prototype
I then created a visual prototype and animation of how exactly the dashboard would look and function to more effectively communicate to engineers how the platform should look and feel.
This same animation would also be used in our marketing assets for investors in our seed round.
When in doubt, use what already works
Since the completion of the dashboard platform, we have seen many positive reviews from other teams, creators, and investors, as well as began to onboard users onto the platform. We are continuing to iterate and add features to the platform as well to increase its suite of features.
Some key takeaways from this project are:
Involve leadership and engineering up front. This helps to reduce any reworking of any pages later on as a mutual understanding of technical limitations initially will inform you on your design strategy.
Don’t be afraid to take from inspiration and from things that already work. This helps create a user experience that users can be familiar with off the bat. By taking inspiration from similar user experiences from other platforms, you can reduce the friction caused by users having to learn your product by implementing best practices. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just improve it.
When you lack resources, don’t hesitate to get creative. While I lacked a user base to test and interview, I instead turned to other teams in the company like engineers and stakeholders to give me feedback and test the dashboard in order to validate my design decisions along the way.
