Draft

Reimagining content creation with an AI-powered text editor

ROLE

Lead Product Designer

DURATION

6 months

YEAR

2022

Draft’s a double-sided marketplace where customers match with writers to create content for them. It’s like Uber but for content.

Without an in-platform text editor, content creation happened outside of Draft. This made writers’ workflows inefficient, and it was difficult for Draft to monitor content quality. Additionally, building a text editor would unlock a new revenue stream for Draft. As we could market it as standalone product for the end consumer.

THE CHALLENGE

LO-FI designs

This phase consisted of creating the user flows and wireframes. My PM and I worked in tight feedback loops to uncover technical questions and firm up scope.

Draft’s a double-sided marketplace where customers match with writers to create content for them. It’s like Uber but for content.

Without an in-platform text editor, content creation happened outside of Draft. This made writers’ workflows inefficient, and it was difficult for Draft to monitor content quality. Additionally, building a text editor would unlock a new revenue stream for Draft. As we could market it as standalone product for the end consumer.

THE CHALLENGE

Draft’s a double-sided marketplace where customers match with writers to create content for them. It’s like Uber but for content.

MY ROLE & TEAM

My team and I were close-knit throughout this build. I co-led the workshops and UXR with my PM. I also worked closely with the engineers throughout the build to support the build and ensure my designs were built to spec.

— Wireframing
— Product strategy
— Design strategy
— Workshop facilitation

MY CONTRIBUTIONS

DMO Interviews

To kick off this project, my PM and I conducted interviews with 4 DMOs to understand how we could help. Several common pains emerged from these interviews:

“I'm the only one on my team now. I'm doing whatever is needed since the pandemic started.”— DMO 1

Reduced teams, higher workloads: As a result of COVID-19 related budget cuts, DMO team sizes were cut. In some cases to a single person.

Not enough visual content: DMOs typical content sources were unreliable. They couldn't source content from social media as people weren’t posting like they used to. They also couldn't create their own content due to team downsizing and lockdown.
Need for COVID-Safe visuals: Prior to COVID-19, DMOs' needed content to attract tourists. Now they needed COVID-safe content (e.g., people wearing masks and socially-distant activities). As the situation rapidly changed, so did their content needs.
New jobs to be done: The pandemic created new jobs for the DMO which intensified their visual content needs such promoting local businesses and being a trustworthy newsource.

KEY FINDINGS —

How might we provide DMOs with a safe and efficient way to source visuals to aid COVID-19 recovery Everybody?

Collector explorations

The audit brought to light why the upload portal was seeing poor adoption rates — it wasn't usable or desirable. My team and I hypothesized that if we could address these issues we'd improve its adoption:

ISSUES & OPPS —

Value prop wasn't clear: it was difficult to understand what this feature was and its benefits
Setup page layout: made setup seems more complex than it was
Too limited:
only have 1 uploader per account
Poor discoverability: it was buried 2 levels deep in the nav
The setup was too technical: it required a developer
Lack of visual appeal: The portal lacked visual appeal and branding options