About Owls（日本語のバージョンこちら👉）
OWLS platform is an internal public opinion center for companies, covering multi-channel network public opinion information. It utilizes algorithm technology combined with a team of public opinion experts to provide various public opinion services for business units.
My Role
Product Strategy
User Research
User Experience
Tools
Figma
TEA (website data analysis platform in Bytedance)
Timeline
During Bytedance Work Experience
🤔 What is risk?
Content security capabilities will focus on two areas: hedging against known risks and reducing damage from legacy risks. To hedge against known risks, actions include expanding and improving hedging ability.
*Currently Owls is trying to transform to focus on both minus and plus news in order to encourage more users to join in.
🤔 What is OWLS doing?
As part of risk perception, public opinion is responsible for mining and obtaining risk information from both internal and external sources, thus "expanding the range of known risks."
🏃🏻♀️ Project Process & Challenge
The main challenge for me is when I started to work on this platform, it had been already built roughly and kept growing larger. But some modules are not fully designed by user needs, in this case, the UV & PV for those modules are quite low. I need to build up a clearer image of user personas for both design side and project team.
📐 Product Goal - why we need iteration
On product side, the goal of OWLS platform is to help product lines and company's side to gather info from whole internet, recognize risk, and submit potential risk to risk platform in order to resolve them as soon as possible
On our design side, the goal is to help users (which is mainly risk digger) to let them smoothly set up news/info more precisely and efficiently, assist them gather related information altogether in case of creating event/character report
The full user journey I created
📌 Core Users
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The main user type in our platform is called News Digger, which is from product line news department. Their daily responsibility is to help product lines such as Douyin, Xigua, to prevent them from spreading of negative public opinion. At the same time, it is necessary to timely discover hot information to help short video platforms like Douyin to carry out hot operation.
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I conducted user research with 4 users who are focusing on different areas (one of them is the leader) and came up with a UX research report & platform persona.
UX research report - for news digger
Persona - for news digger
Detailed user journey - for news digger
💻 Related Products
Below are some related products I found with product designer. Some of them are popular through websites, others are used frequently by our users. But all of them have some pros and cons which cannot be replaced.
⭐️ The Problem as a UIUX Designer I Planed to solve Are
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Problem 1: Some previous functions are built without fully understanding of user needs (High)
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Problem 2: Some old designs contain a lot of proper nouns and usage flow, causing new users to not know how to use the platform (Medium)
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Problem 3: Some tiny user experience design details (such as information displayed) actually affect users' efficiency (High)
💡 What are My Solutions
Increased Breadth and Flexibility of Event Analysis (Fix problem 1)
Before
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Based on user needs, they need to compose daily/weekly report and it takes tons of time. I designed the risk character module and add more analysis dimensions which greatly reduce the time (they used to gather data by themselves in order to create chart, and those actions are on websites outside of Bytedance which is also dangerous)
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Also, as new separated module, it creates more opportunities for users to observe abnormal situations and potential risks.
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Thirdly, some events are tightly connected to each other, but previously the user had to build up the chain by themselves. The new function allows user see the whole timeline of the event and continuously observe its happening
New Solution
Redesigned the structure of the list and added custom warnings (Fix problem 1 & 2 & 3)
Before
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The user has indicated that in their daily process of monitoring hot events, they need to compare the occurrences on different hotlists. The previous design did not meet their daily needs. Therefore, I made some changes by fixing the data aggregated by OWLS on the left and making it easy for them to compare on the right.
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At the same time, users can customize their own exclusive hot event monitoring by confirming their own interests. When the trigger condition is met, a message will be directly pushed to them.
New Solution
Polish the most commonly used function of creating news subscriptions (Fix problem 1 & 2 & 3)
Before
During the research period, users complained that their most commonly used public opinion subscription list was not conducive to their daily browsing.
The main problems are:
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Administrators who need to view subscription tasks on the details page do not meet the usage scenario.
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The effective area of the page is too narrow to accommodate a large number of subscription tasks.
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The top area is too high, and when viewing all tasks, you can only slide down the page in a narrow area, which is very inconvenient.
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The new pop-up window interaction form is contrary to the interaction habits of other parts of the platform.
New Solution
Redesign homepage & add landing page (Fix problem 1 & 2)
Before
Originally, OWLS' homepage only had a search box and no overview of new users. It was difficult to present the platform's functions comprehensively and attract new users. The new design aggregates the platform's main capabilities, and for new users who enter the platform for the first time, they can see a comprehensive introduction to the platform.
New Solution
😄 Feedback from our users
After the redesign and launch of the mentioned modules, I interviewed previous users and received the following feedback:
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They really like the new design, finding it more user-friendly and intuitive.
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The new hot topic monitoring feature is very helpful to them, enabling them to better track the topics they are aware of
🎉 Reconstruction of homepage
The newly launched homepage has greatly increased the number of new users and daily page views (PV) and unique visitors (UV) on the Owls platform.
The new version of the homepage and overview page provides richer content and access to other key modules, allowing users to jump to more functional modules such as popular events, rankings, and product monitoring.
📒 Retrospective
I learned a lot during being the design owner of Owls platform. It's my very first time of creating personas for enterprise-level platform. For enterprise-level products, it's much easier to get close to user and hear their voice. But sometimes, based on our chasing for speed and efficiency, it's quite easy to overlook their original needs.
Sometimes in internet company like Bytedance, especially for internal platforms, it's quite normal that the designers don't have enough time to learn users' needs. The product designers tend to make a quick interview with representative of users and immediately finish the product requirements. But after several rounds, we disappointedly found that the users don't like what we built.
So as a UI/UX designer, it's extremely important that we need to build a common relationship with users. It don't have to be too intense, just some casual talk before and after product requirement shaped would be really helpful.