Case Study: Scrunch Profile Analysis
Instagram’s API and scraping functionality will allow Scrunch, an influencer marketing platform, to present analytics on the makeup of an influencer’s followers, such as their gender, age and location. I wanted to look at how this raw data could be best presented and used in the product and how this can benefit the end user, with enhanced searching and filtering, and enable them to find influencers for their brand quicker and easier.
Solutioning
Using my experience designing analytics and dashboards in Simple, as well as studying best practices and social media analytics tools (such as Sprinklr and KUKU.io) I was able to visualise the raw data in the most intuitive way for the user.
Before doing any work on wireframes, I had a look at the profile page as it currently is in the product, and its various breakpoints, so that the solution would be responsive and suitable for mobile devices too.
I also looked at what existing design patterns I could leverage, to design a solution that’s consistent with the current product and avoid unnecessarily introducing new design patterns.
Designing for scale
Fitting the profile and audience analytics on the one page would be a stretch, and they deserve their seperate pages. By using the existing tab pattern in Scrunch, each influencer profile page has more structure – this is a more scalable solution, too – there may be other tabs in the future.
Visualising the data
Without knowing much about the user base of Crunch, and the user personas, an assumption I made is that people want enough information upfront about each influencer, to know whether they’re suitable for their brand or not – without necessarily serving them up too much data. The idea behind each chart was to surface only the most important information, and show more with a tooltip on hover (or a tap, for mobile devices).
I used donut charts for types of data where I felt users mostly want to see what the largest proportion is at a glance, such as Gender Split. However, for Mentions and Hashtags, I thought it would be more creative and intuitive to use a word cloud type representation (the larger the text, the higher the % it has in the data). When hovering on a hashtag for instance, more data could be shown if it’s available, such as the number of times the influencer has used the hashtag.
The Instagram-style mention tooltips would immediately be familiar to users of Instagram – but may not scale if showing analytics for other social networks, where a more generic approach would be better suited.
Filtering and segments
Filtering the data could be a really great way for a user to see what % or number of followers the influencer has, that the brand actually wants to target or can benefit from.
Let’s look at a new Xbox game, targeting males ages 13 – 17 in Australia, in metro cities. They’re looking for an influencer that’s going to really benefit their brand as much as possible, by having the most suitable followers. The features Scrunch already has make it possible for them to find suitable influencers for their brand, but if they could use the analysis data to not only get stats on the followers, but also show them the pool of followers they’ll benefit from, it would give Scrunch the power to really make the most of the raw data.
With no filtering applied, the brand can see the total number of followers the influencer has. As they begin to select the demographics they’re wanting to target, such as one or more age groups, regions, ethnicities, etc, the number of followers will decrease and filter down to show them the true number of followers they’ll potentially benefit from.
This opens up further possibilities, such as enabling the Brand to setup pre-configured segments (one or more target audience, based on age brackets, location, etc) and easily select it on the analysis page, to instantly see how many desirable followers they’ll reach, but ultimately see how suitable this influencer is for their brand. Finally, with this new capability, filters can be surfaced in the influencer directory, to really fine tune search results for a brand, and give them a true indication of the desirable followers they’ll reach from an influencer.