Cover picture

Monitor

Brandwatch merged with falcon.io, the goal was to create a unified product suite.

How can we create a vision around a new product called Monitor?

What did I do?

  • Design workshops
  • OOUX
  • Concept mapping
  • Sketches
  • Wireframes
  • Visual design exploration
  • Hi-fi prototype

Background

Combining two companies and multiple products to create a unified product offering is not easy, we first needed to uncover core items like:

  • Onboarding
  • Asset governance
  • Permission and access
  • Product navigation

We also needed to rethink what the products in the suite did, a few top level themes jumped out early:

  • Monitoring your brand
  • Consumer research
  • Crisis management
  • Trend detection
  • Content publishing
  • Advertising

Planning out future products that focued on a single user case made us question if our flag ship product needed breaking into smaller parts.

Previously consumer research has not been described as user friendly.

Brandwatch is like a hardware store, an expert with a project in mind can gather resoruces and tools to compelte any task.

From a design perspective, it's tricky to help this expert, we can't help them complete a goal if we don't even understand what project they are working on.

What would a Brandwatch product look like if we understood the project and could help the user achieve their goal?

How can we create a concept for a new product that only tries to solve Brand monitoring

Pain point mapping

We asked different stakeholders to explain the pain points around brand monitoring.

Pain points

Screenshot from Miro showing pain points

Possible features

The team worked on mapping out what the monitor product could solve.

Features

Screenshot from Miro showing possible features

Possible solutions

We took possible solutions and affinity mapped them, the groups were named to be memorable to quickly refer back to them.

Ideas were mapped out based on their need and market gap, other ideas were placed into a beyond column which didn’t plan to include in the initial concept.

Features

Solutions on a pressing to market gap matrix

Concept map

We knew we wanted to create a clickable prototype, so we moved forward by trying to understand how items connected together. We did a combination of OOUX and concept mapping to add definition to the solutions.

Features

Screenshot of a concept map

Sketching

We wanted to move quickly, so I jumped into sketching some quick flows with the focus around telling a compelling story.

Sketching

Low fi sketching of key screens

Adding visuals

My prevoius work on Vizia to intorduce a new visual style across all charts and components gave me a great starting point for a bold high fidelitiy mockup.

Sketching

High fi mockup of the insights feed

Trying something new

Using existing designs makes the work feel more grounded, but we were wanting to create a vision, so we tried new colors and breaking away the rules of the design system.

Sketching

High fi mockup of the insights feed

Final design

The final output was some high fideility designs to be used in presentations and to create a clickable prototype.

Sketching

Setup flow, seelct industry

Sketching

Industry insight feed

Sketching

Exported brand pulse check report

What I would do differently

Schedule better

Overall it took a month from start to finish, I expected it to only take us three weeks, next time I would allow for extra time to finish things properly.

The cutting room floor

We had so many great ideas during the process that we cut out only because they would be hard to add into the concept. I wish I did a better job at documenting them. Near the end of the project we started a file called the cutting room floor, where any ideas we dropped were documented.

Agree on a content theme early on

We wanted to avoid any lorem ipsum or dummy content that didn't follow a consistent theme, however, we only picked this theme near the end of the project, so I had to spend a lot of time updating all charts / titles / cards / dropdowns. If we agreed on this early on, I would have saved myself days of work.