Photography
About the project
I first met Daniel at a UX meetup event, where he expressed the need for design help with a service that his company offered. Daniel is the founder and owner of software development agency - Hatchet and sister SEO agency Bud Social. I contracted out to the businesses for the duration of this project.
Client: Hatchet + Bud Social
When: February - April 2021
Team: Mia Campbell-Foulkes - Designer
Situation
Where Hatchet was the flagship company for software and website development, the sister agency Bud social, provided clients with other services such as digital marketing and Search Engine Optimization. As the Bud Social team was very small and business expansion was a top priority, there was a necessity to push for more automation and ways to ensure tasks that were completed externally were being executed correctly.
Task
One of the methods the Bud Social agency used for SEO were: building and monitoring citations across directory websites. By creating a large quantity of links across other websites it improved the google ranking of their clients websites.
They faced many issues with both the creation and maintenance such as:
Problem 1:
There was no way to track output and productivity of offshore staff
Problem 2:
Citation maintenance was very time-consuming and difficult.
Problem 3:
It was difficult and confusing for new employees to create citations
Action
Users
Working as a contractor, it was super important to quickly understand who the problems were affecting. The above problems implied that we were not just creating solutions for the staff but also for the managers who were overseeing this work.
Solutions for both ‘users-facing’ and ‘admin-facing’ were needed.
Problem 1
There was no way to track output and productivity of offshore staff.
Both from an internal agency (Bud Social) perspective and an external customer perspective, it was important to have a log of all the citations that were being created daily and any older citations that needed attention. We also needed a system that the agency could use to update their clients with all the work that they were doing.
Insights and Initial Solutions
The low-fi wireframe below shows the skeleton of an initial solution. A live table that showed newest customers, most recent citation submissions and citations that required attention - be it to remove, update or investigate the backlinks/ permalinks.
This dashboard from an admin view could also show who the citations were created by and when.
Reception, changes and Challenges
Although the dashboard was a good start, additional details needed to be presented. This led us to create separate citation and customer tables. This meant that the ‘home’ dashboard became a simplified snapshot with: ‘recently updated citations’ and ‘recent citation activity’, providing a high-level view of customers' growth.
Problem 3
It was difficult and confusing for new employees to create citations.
Citations for SEO purposes are not so much about quality but rather high quantity. Finding websites to host details about their clients is a very repetitive but time-consuming process.
For this reason, this work was outsourced to low-level data entry workers. For new workers, the concept of creating a citation from scratch and remembering what information was needed for each citation was hard to grasp from the outset. To reduce the amount of time it would take to train these staff we needed to propose a solution that did a lot of hand-holding.
Insights & Initial Solutions for Problem 1
We needed to find a user-friendly way to guide and teach low-level data entry clerks through the process of creating a citation for the client. During this process, they would also use the majority of the same customer information for each provider host, so a library of resources would also be beneficial.
Part of this step-by-step system also included asset libraries for customers that already existed. If the customer had not yet been created, there was an opportunity to input that content (such as images, descriptions, addresses, phone numbers etc) to copy and paste to future citations and confirm the existing information was still valid and correct. This ensured that all information had one localised place to save time and avoid human error.
Challenges
This guide was not something that I was able to truly nut out with the director, so the wireframing stage was basically non-existent as I created it with a high-fi mock up assets from the Tailwind library and reworked it on the fly.
Result
Conclusion
As I was fairly new to the UX world, I didnt have the confidence to push for the research required to create this product. I ran with what the director of Hatchet believed the product should do and not what the main administrator was requiring. I believe this would have saved us from underdelivering to expectations and we would have been able to bridge the gap of misunderstanding. Instead because of the miscommunication here, there was a noticeable power struggle/ strain between the managers of Hatchet and Bud Social.
Because this was an internal tool, we didn’t issue user testing so it wasn’t proven to work perfectly before development. Also regarding development - my contract did not extend past the design phase so, I wasn’t there to answer questions, problems that may have arisen, elements that may have required tweaking or complete a total fool-proof handover which was a real shame.
Despite the aspects I would change, it was a positive experience where I learned more about the capabilities of back and front-end development, how CSS libraries such as Tailwind expedite the design process and the importance of defining the goals across the whole team before commencing work!
Problem 2
Citation maintenance was very time-consuming and difficult.
Citation maintenance was very time-consuming and difficult. They were faced with problems such as: not knowing if the backlinks were still active, if the providers (directories) were still active, if there were 404 issues or permalinks missing.
Insights and Initial Solutions
Part of this solution was to work with the back-end development team to understand what could be checked automatically and then to create a dashboard that presents these checks.
The wireframe sketches show the citations grouped into both valid and invalid and then present relevant information, such as when it was last checked, any issues that needed to be corrected and whether it had been indexed yet. Downloading full reports and sorting by columns were also features of these tables, that came during the mock-up stage.
Changes and Challenges
As this was a fairly technical and involved aspect to the project, I did need a lot of guidance in what was possible. The tools, structures and API’s that were specific to pulling citation data were aspects that only backend devs would know, so it was very much a case of ‘you don’t know, what you don’t know’ for me. Luckily for me, the fields were provided - it was just a case of stylising and presenting the information clearly.