Jay Park Design

Minds

Enhancing the user experience in a community-powered service

At a glance

UX Consulting

Enhancing experience in a subscription service

Minds is an open source and decentralized social network aiming to elevate global discourse in order to combat “big tech” companies through Internet freedom. Their mission yearns to democratize the way that media is created and consumed.

PROJECT TYPE

Team

MY ROLE

Product Design,

User Research

TOOLS

Notion, Figjam,

Figma

DURATION

8 weeks

BACKGROUND

Introducing MINDS+

Minds+ allows users to access premium content and submit their own content for a share of their revenue.
By subscribing, users unlock new features and are able to directly support their favorite creators.

PROBLEM

Our client's goal was to increase the rate of subscription of their product, MINDS+.

However,

Minds+ content and reward system were not living up to user expectations.

SOLUTION

Encourage creators to post authentic contents for exclusivity

RESEARCH

Understand how Minds fits into the current landscape

Hear from users

To further our understanding of current user pain points and subscription motivation trends amongst current Minds+ users, we collected and analyzed nearly 300 survey responses:

"You got to make a lot to break even"

"Minds + posts had less reach and less interaction"

"Most of the Minds Plus posts are repetitive photos from Google, which makes the posts boring and no fun"

Narrowing down the audiences

From these results, we grouped similar sentiments from the survey results to locate key insights in our research findings. By doing so, we could pinpoint the most common and addressable issues for our given problem scope.

Social Users

Creators

Get in detail

To further bolster our familiarity with the target user group and how they use Minds+ on a daily basis, we set out to conduct focus groups and contextual inquiries with both social users and content creators of varying popularities.

INSIGHTS

Some common pain points

From these survey results and user interviews, we consolidated our research findings into four main categories to guide us through the ideation process.

Disappointing revenue system

"I paid but didn't return this money back, for me is like paying for using minds... Not to get profit!"

Lack of quality contents

"People use regurgitated material behind a Plus pay wall. I personally find it unethical if your content is not original."

Less reach & discoverability

"It's proprietary...I want my content to reach the outside world...why would I want to hide it behind a wall where they can't see it?"

Lack of features

"only can upload 1 photo, can’t upload audio only post, can’t use external links, etc.."

And then we categorized the pain points for each user group.

Broken give&take logic.

Narrowing down the scope with 4 whys.

Creators complaining they don't seem to be earning on Minds+

WHY?

Because there's not many users joining Minds+ which leads to less reach

WHY?

Because social users feel like the quality of content on Minds+ are not worth it

WHY?

Because there is no motivation for creators to post something original

WHY?

Because copy and paste someone else's content are more profitable

But what if we…

Encourage creators to post something original

Minds+ post quality goes up

More reach as more social users will join

Total revenue goes up for creators

Problem solved!

Okay so…

After synthesizing our findings and identifying key pain points that we need to address in our solution, we reframed our problem scope and asked ourselves:

How might we encourage creators to post original contents?

IDEATION

After figuring out our users’ pain points, we came up with diverse ideas using the Crazy 8’s rapid ideation method. Afterwords, we categorized each idea into four aspects and voted on which ideas we should focus on the most. Finally, we sorted those ideas into a 2x2 priority matrix to finalize the feature we were to move forward with.

After voting, we decided to create the feature called "Weekly Challenge" which encourages users to post their own content for possible rewards.

Pivot

The main issue users faced was a lack of quality content, so we decided to pursue our most promising idea of presenting challenges to only Minds Plus users to encourage quality content creation and users to discover more genuine Minds Plus creators.

This concept overlapped with an existing feature, Superminds, so we pivoted to using Superminds to improve Minds Plus’ subscriptions.

FInal solution

Onboarding to Superchallenge

Users are able to select filter options to create more personalized SuperChallenges.

Challenge Feed Page

The general Challenge Feed page displays ongoing SuperChallenges and previous submission posts from other users.

Newsfeed Redesign

Selected small creators that submit entries are showcased in the Newsfeed page to increase discoverability.

MINDS+ Redesign

The layout of Minds+ when supporting a wider variety of media types including podcasts, short videos, and blog posts.

Reflection

Throughout the semester, it was an amazing and fruitful opportunity to work closely with a client in a novel problem space. If we had more time, we would have looked into designing more implementable features.

Designing for this user group was an incredibly rewarding experience! Throughout the entirety of this project, we learned the value of applying insights from user research to support our solutions, as well as the technical limitations in designing for web products.

Minds Team @ BI Design Showcase :-))

CRAFT

CONTACT

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