UX/UI Design and research
Keyhole
An intuitive social media dashboard that reaches over 600 registered users and 10,000 daily free users
Keyhole is a social media analytics company that serves to deliver accurate metrics to both B2B and B2C clients. Its enterprise software tracks hashtags and keywords on large social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. Its customers use it to measure the engagement of event campaigns, view growth metrics, contact influencers and provide comprehensive reports for stakeholders.
As the first design hire, I worked across the entire website and existing product to consolidate and improve the design process for the team moving forward. Using Agile methods, each project was managed in 2 week sprints, with weekly sprint check-ins.
Summary
Keyhole had been around for 4 years before I joined. Between 2017 - 2019, I lead a re-design of the enterprise dashboard, ran multiple user research projects, and consolidated the design system and documentation from the ground up.
With support from its founders, I conducted a 2-day customer discovery and competitor analysis workshop to help align the team's understanding of the product with Keyhole's value proposition.
1
Scope of role
- A new design system
- Re-designed self-serve analytics dashboard
- Designed landing pages explaining how Keyhole served different industries
- A new product tier geared towards brand-focused clients
- An online Social Media Analytics course for paid users built on Thinkific
- Regular user research check-ins
Challenge
How can we strengthen product awareness and usage with a consistent design system prioritizing user needs?
Tools
design
Qualitative research
Quantitative research
Design Process
2
The user journey
Research Topics
- Learning about current users to identify their use patterns
- How they currently engaged with the product
- How they engaged with competitor products
- How to encourage long-term interaction with Keyhole's platform
Who were Keyhole's main competitors?
Most customers already used a suite of social media monitoring software. These platforms often had overlapping features and were chosen based on criteria such as:
- Company Budget
- Number of brand customers
- Influencer and campaign use cases
- Brand campaign duration
Keyhole's features tended towards both social media management and monitoring, with a lighter emphasis on direct customer relationships.
3
The two main features
The tracker
(Click for more images)
A term, whether hashtag or keyword that a user wants to track. By default, the tool directed a user to Add or View their trackers.
A term, whether hashtag or keyword that a user wants to track. By default, the tool directed a user to Add or View their trackers.
The dashboard
(Click for more images)
Once a term is entered, the user is directed to the tracker dashboard when they click 'Preview'. They could then save the tracker after preview. Each section was a dynamic module that updated data in real-time.
The Timeline showed 4 key metrics: Total posts, Total unique users, Volume of follower reach, Direct engagement (impressions) with these followers
Once a term is entered, the user is directed to the tracker dashboard when they click 'Preview'. They could then save the tracker after preview. Each section was a dynamic module that updated data in real-time.
The Timeline showed 4 key metrics: Total posts, Total unique users, Volume of follower reach, Direct engagement (impressions) with these followers
4
Research Findings
Tracker Feature
Good
Needs improvement
- #Hashtag search, the most used search format, was active by default
- A sparse use of colours made the accent blue stand out on important elements
- Too many options were confusing
- The amount of blue used in the overall UI distracted from necessary functions
- Users unsure if searching #hashtag vs hashtag would display different data
- How to encourage long-term interaction with Keyhole's platform
Dashboard Feature
Good
Needs improvement
- Filtering by Engagement and Klout score was regularly used and important to users
- Being able to see overall sentiment towards a term or campaign was invaluable to many users
- Filters had powerful and extensive sorting that allowed users to drill down to minutiae
- To access specific details, a user had to click 'View more...' for a full list, depending on module
- Lack of images for many user accounts made it difficult to tell if the accounts were real people, and there was confusion on how user data was pulled
- Users unsure if searching #hashtag vs hashtag would display different data
- Advanced sorting and export features were too hidden and did not have a 'reset all' option
As I wrapped up my product research,
I noticed further areas of improvement:
I noticed further areas of improvement:
- 💡 Responsiveness
- 💡 Lack of empty and new states
- 💡 Lack of consistency in design language