Luceo Social

Pedal-to-the-metal startup using Lean UX

Elevator Pitch

Luceo Social is a social analytics SaaS product used by marketing teams to understand how their content (blog articles, product pages etc.) is trending socially, and help them plan what content to create next. It is built using Lean UX methodology by a team of 3 co-founders. I directed user experience from early ideas, through prototypes, to public Beta, and subsequent acquisition.

This case study shows the process from the beginning to the acquisition 10 months later.

My Role

Concepting and Ideation
Early interface creation and working with co-founders on defining the basic problem and potential solutions.  

Market Fit
Evaluate competitors, their feature sets, and defining our competitive advantage.

User Research
Formal study of target users and collecting and interpreting feedback from Alpha and Beta users.

UX Execution
All the UX and UI work for the project, from beginning to the end.

Managing Deployments
Soliciting feedback from alpha/beta deployment users and planning roadmaps for our customers.

And all the other co-founder stuff...
Raising capital and investor relations.

The Problem

The crux of the problem was that marketers couldn’t answer a simple question:

What is my most socially popular content?

Most existing tools gave only partial answers, by exclusively looking at social feeds and not the entirety of published content. We set out to solve this problem by building a big data solution with simple analytics that any marketer could understand and use. Armed with new insights from Luceo, marketers could make smarter decisions on what content to produce in the future.

Challenges

Volume of data

Our solution was comprehensive and tracked social trends of thousands of pieces of content, multiple times a day. UX challenge was to summarize all that data into simple and insightful directional metrics.
 

Simple and cheap

Solution we produced had to slot into complex set of tools marketers were already using. With no time or desire to learn new tools, or purchase expensive alternatives, our solution had to be cheap to afford and have very flat learning curve.
 

Resource constraints

With only 3 of us doing everything, and a small seed round providing limited runway, we had to be ultra-efficient in our resource allocation and the way we approached our UX work. Only most essential, value building features could be realistically considered.

The Approach: Lean UX

Before starting Luceo, we worked with enough marketers to know that the problem we were planning to solve was real. What we needed was a quick way to test our assumptions and solutions. Enter Lean UX.

Given our small team of 3 people, we decided to use the Build - Measure - Learn method of Lean UX. We implemented a series of smaller product releases to validate our technical and UX solutions. We remained flexible and made adjustments after each phase, shifting direction several times as we learned more. Each phase involved testing with a small set of trusted users who would use the builds and give feedback. Eventually we built enough features and positive feedback to release the MVP and have it used in Beta capacity by several marketing agencies.

The Ring

The key visualization, which we built the product around, was The Ring. It’s a simple donut chart that visualized number of social interactions (likes, shares etc) and the social networks that provided them.  The design had to achieve the following: 

• Be simple and easily interpreted
• Be flexible enough to display variable number of social networks
• Can be modified to add / remove social networks as needed
• Compact enough to be versatile
• Can display both totals and increments (deltas)
• Can give directional information first and provide more detailed info second
• Can accommodate the asynchronous nature of gathering social networks

The visualization became so well liked by our users that we eventually adopted a form of it for our branding.

v0.1: The Concept

What we Built

Initial concept centered around a dashboard that displayed how various content tracked socially. The assumption was that users would want to consume these metrics in a form of static reports, with newsletter content being most interesting to marketers initially. We built basic wire flows and showed them to potential users.

What we Learned

It became very clear that marketers weren’t even aware that they can get this type of analytics for their content, let alone their competitors!
We needed to demonstrate the concept of social score for a single piece of content in simple and interactive way first. Instead proceeding with time consuming newsletter monitoring infrastructure as originally planned, we shifted to building  Social Search.

v0.2 Social Search

What we Built

We created a simple search that fetched search engine results and ranked them according to our newly devised social score. It showcased our social ring concept and combined the social metrics with traditional keyword search. Our assumption was that marketers would start seeing the value of social metrics when trying to discover quality content.

What we Learned

Users responded extremely well to the demo and started using it for their daily searches. Many new questions about the metrics we could provide followed, indicating that their perspective on social relevance was changing. Potential investors started asking much deeper questions around understanding social traction around the entire content set. This refocused us towards the problem of visualizing the entirety of own or competitor's content.

v0.3 Social Map

What we Built

To showcase website social footprint, we built the Social Map. It’s a force-directed graph that shows the map of all content branches and nodes, sizing them according to the all-time social traction (likes, shares, retweets etc.). We built the map separately from the rest of the web app since we didn't know if it provided value yet. 

What we Learned

Social Map resonated very strongly with investors as they could finally see the scope and magnitude of the data and underlying technology. Marketers found it interesting for their own content, but really liked it for understanding competitor's strengths. They also wanted to see the UI focus on bringing the content forward more, and show how it performed recently (as opposed to all-time metrics).

v0.4 Social Trends

What we Built

Following feedback to bring the content forward, we created a list of trending content along with overall summary that focused on most recent social performance (instead of overall scores). We also wanted to differentiate trending score from overall score, and tried implementing a simple bar graph instead of using the ring. Finally we started tying social channels, where content was posted, to the content itself to see if users started seeing the connection between the two.

What we Learned

People responded well to the the content getting a more prominent treatment (photos, titles etc.). Bar graph vs the ring caused some controversy and the feedback was split, with slight majority finding the ring more intuitive (or just having a visual preference). We also found that advanced filtering wasn't really being used.

Marketers were intrigued by the connection between content being shared organically and being boosted via social channels, so we decided to augment social channel display in the next iteration.

v0.5: Social Channels

What we Built

While previous iteration showed if a blog post was shared socially, this iteration, looked at which social posts had blog post linked to it. It was a look at the same content-to-post connection, but from a different perspective. We created a simple social post timeline and highlighted content that was shared. Timeline also highlighted basic feed metrics: subscribers, total social interactions etc. across all social channels (twitter, facebook, google+, youtube etc).

What we Learned

Once again, we saw that there is still residual confusion about how users think about organically shared content (ex. user decides to tweet about your recipe) and socially promoted content (ex. Food brand shares own recipe on their social channel). We also learned that marketers see both blog posts and social posts as content, something we saw as quite different. 

At this point we also ran a more formal user research, doing structured interviews with 8 content managers. We found that they rely on social media feed scheduling tools, like Hootsuite, for all their social metrics and that we would have to add content publishing workflow to have them switch to our product.

Given these findings, we decided not to pursue additional work on social channels.

v0.6: Multiple Clients

What we Built

This iteration built on Social Trends and added a way to group and navigate different websites/brands separately, instead of viewing the data together. This reflected the organizational structure within several marketing agencies that were using our product, where marketers manage several brands at once but as separate clients.

Another change was introducing a grid layout for content, which was better suited for highly visual food and lifestyle content our Beta users were managing.

What we Learned

Marketing agency users responded well to latest iteration, especially the tiles. They also realized the value of looking at the social footprint of many competitive brands but didn’t necessarily want to track them in Luceo permanently. This gave us the idea to produce one-time brand reports and we focused on that for the next iteration.

Acquisition and Beyond

During iteration v0.6, and after 10 months and several successful pilots, Luceo was acquired by Fexy Media.

Although Luceo didn’t continue as a separate SaaS product, the technology continued to be used for internal purposes. The most notable example was Brand Overview Report that provides one-time snapshot of a content website and their social footprint.