Content Marketplace - Scrivo
Overview
Scrivo is a content marketplace for financial advisors and content writers. My team developed a digital solution for Veriday Company to deliver scalable content writing and syndication to thousands of regulated financial advisors. As the UX designer in the team, I led the design process from discovery to delivery. We presented our conceptual prototype at Veriday Head Office on March 30th, 2016 and won the prize as the best team.
Design Process
1. Discovery - Market & User Research
First of all, we conducted a competitive analysis among existing content marketplace platforms. Examples include upwork.com, freelancer.ca, and guru.com. As for user research, the team collectively interviewed 10 financial advisors from different financial organizations such as TD, RBC, Freedom 55, and HollisWealth.
From our research, we discovered three different types of financial advisor and created the following personas:
- Brokers/Third Party Advisors, e.g. HollisWealth
- Independent Financial Advisors, e.g. Freedom 55
- Retail Bank Financial Advisors, e.g. TD Canada Trust
The two main frustrations that financial advisors experience are the lack of time and the difficulty of finding personalized content. After better understanding the business and user goals, we started the ideation process.
2. Ideation - User Experience Map & Task Flow
Firstly, I organized a problem-solving ideation session with the team where we used "HMW" method to reframe our challenges as opportunities and ideated the potential solutions. After we prioritized the massive amount of ideas based on the impact and feasibility, we landed on two major service streams:
- Provide ready-to-use content for financial advisors who don’t have enough time.
- Provide customizable content for financial advisors who need personalized content.
Based on the two service streams, we mapped out the end-to-end user journey in order to further analyze what users are doing, thinking, and feeling at each stage.
Then, we summarized main concepts from the opportunities in the journey map and created a task flow map to understand the basic structure and major user flows of our platform.
3. Creation - Sketch & Wireframe
Based on the main features and task flow of our platform, we sketched out the user interface of our main pages and designed initial low-fi wireframes.
4. Iteration - Prototype & User Testing
We created an interactive prototype on InVision in order to conduct task-based user testing. After synthesizing the result, we refined our prototype according to their feedback and did more usability testing with students by providing them various scenarios of financial advisors and content writers.
Final Product Scrivo - Key Features
1. Collaboration
Scrivo brings compliance officers and financial advisors early in the content creation phase for compliance guidance and enables general editing. In addition, snapshots are taken of content writer’s work every 10 minutes, which is held in Scrivo’s database to ensure work is efficiently completed.
2. Job Posting
Scrivo is scalable with job postings, as content writers can come back to the platform to look for jobs if they’re unable to find work with a specific client.
3. Progress Tracking
Scrivo solves a transparency issue with the indication and updates on content writer’s project development and work status.
4. Recommendation System
This system improves recommendations when user’s tags automatically get updated based on the content, writers, and job postings the user favourites.
5. Customizable Dashboard
Scrivo provides the flexibility for users to customize their dashboard by simply rearranging the cards on the dashboard.
Reflection
As a final evaluation we pitched our product and concept at Veriday Head Office in Toronto and won a prize as the best team. In this project, I had a great opportunity to work in team with my classmates, wear different hats as UX researcher, interactive designer and UI designer and gain practical experiences of Design Sprint, Agile Project Management and User-Centered Design.