This is the story of how we navigated changing goals, came up with new ideas and came together to demonstrate our vision for the future of The Serious Type.

Project background

The Serious Type started as a platform for “empowering and equipping youth to create a happier and healthier world.” The platform began as a safe alternative to traditional social media to engage youth in activism, creativity and community.

Nikki founded a non-profit organization to help teens fulfill their passions and work as creators in a meaningful way. She approached this project with the goal to provide a safe platform for sharing content while supporting mental health. Nikki is a visionary and had many wonderful ideas that at times changed the direction of the project but were interesting to run with nonetheless.

Project details

The Team

  • 4 Content Strategists

  • 8 UX Researchers

  • 6 UX Designers

  • 1 Project Manager

  • 3 Product Strategists

Tools

  • FigJam/Figma

  • Pen and paper

  • Trello

  • Google Sheets

  • Google Docs

Duration

  • 8 Weeks

My role

UX Content Strategist:

  • Collaborated with research, design and product teams to create the task flow and user flow

  • Sketched ideas and gave feedback on designs to adhere to UX conventions

  • Wrote copy for lo-fi wireframes

  • Managed stakeholder expectations

Problem and goals

The problem:

Nikki’s vision for TST changed and she wanted to make a company to produce and showcase creative projects. Nikki wanted to give her audience a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process and give her community a place to create, collaborate and share work.

The goal:

To create an inclusive platform for sharing creative work while matching The Serious Type’s new identity and branding to a new target audience.

Brainstorming a new identity

We discovered a mismatch between The Serious Type’s current branding and new direction

Potential names

My team spent 8 weeks brainstorming brand names that would evoke an emotional response from Nikki’s audience and would grow and adapt along with the company. The current TST branding didn’t fit with the new idea as the target audience and purpose of the platform changed, so we thought of ideas that might work best:

  • The Creative Type

  • Soul Collabs

  • Pivot

  • Rewild Souls

  • Bison.us

  • Inspirewise

  • Oursociety

  • Radiate Spirit Collective

Our Pivot: A new name and a new mission

“Our Pivot” became our favorite idea. It evokes a feeling of movement, change, potential and possibility. Although Nikki suggested the word “pivot”, she wasn’t ready to commit to a name change at this time.

We learned through interviews with creative individuals and Nikki that there was a sense of “like-minded and like hearted” creatives coming together for the greater good. This idea became the new mission statement.

Potential logo ideas to go with the new name

“The Serious Type’s mission is to bring a community of like-minded and like-hearted creatives together to uplift the world through the power of self-expression”

Bringing branding and design together

The content strategy, design and research teams collaborated to understand our target audience and how the new TST platform might function.

Persona

The pivot for this project meant we had to identify a new target audience:

  1. Adults (specific age not determined)

  2. Creative (artists/writers/other creators)

  3. Looking to collaborate and share their art

When creating the task flow and copy, we had to carefully consider our audience and how they can be successful. This is where the persona was most helpful.

Wireframing

Before content: The images below show first iteration, low fidelity wireframes that the design team came up with.

About Page-1st iteration.png
Submission page-pre-content.png

After content: Several features were added to demonstrate how the persona would more easily navigate adding a post. We added:

  1. Strong verbs and simple language in the call to action buttons

  2. Tooltips to guide users (i.e. prompts for text boxes)

  3. Minimal text on screen to avoid clutter and confusion

  4. Additional options for hidden menus (i.e the boxes in the corner of each post)

Project Page.png
Submission page-newest.png

Demonstration of the posting flow

Because the pivot happened with 4 weeks remaining in the phase, there wasn’t much time to fully develop a prototype. I took initiative and put together a very brief demonstration of how the posting flow would work.

Next steps:

  • Concept testing and usability testing of the design and integration of the designs done in the previous phase of this project

  • Iterations and improvements based on user feedback

  • Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goals (SMART goals) with Nikki

  • Utilizing social media to get more eyes on the updates and progress of the new branding for The Serious Type and capturing that data to make informed updates to the site and social media pages

Lessons and takeaways

  • How to effectively communicate ideas with our stakeholder and empathize at the same time

  • The need for ongoing collaboration between design, research and content strategy teams

  • How to balance the goals of the organization with the goals of the person using the product

  • How to improve my UX writing skills through using strong verbs, concise words, and being involved with the research and design processes to know the product and flows inside and out