Role: Product Designer, Product Manager, Design Lead
DIAGNOSTIC, COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS, AND MARKET RESEARCH
When I started my role as the product designer of OEC, the platform was a free open-source platform of data visualization of trade data, the number of users was stable and close de 10 thousand per month. To understand the market opportunity of OEC to grow, I started a complete diagnostic of the quantitative analytics - hotjar and google analytics, and c market research to understand the competition.
The added value of the OEC was the data pipeline of the engineering team, allowing them to get the latest data - a few months old only when the competition was showing data from a few years ago.
The market potential of the OEC was important, the platform could be a leader in the field and generate revenue. Important steps were necessary to achieve that goal:
- A rigorous user research to understand the needs and goals of the potential paying customers
- A complete redesign of the UX/UI of the platform and building of a new brand
- A growth and marketing strategy
> Competiton Analysis
> Design Research
To make sure the product vision is grounded in rigorous user research, I used google analytics user's behavior insights to help me understand the different type of users, their goals, and their needs.
I decided then to run some interviews and usability testing with potential users who didn't know the OEC to test a few software and UI of the website. I took notes of their navigation, questions, and thoughts while using the product.
> Value Proposition
The design improvement and new feature development were based on the user study.
UX/UI DESIGN AND BRANDING
The OEC needed a complete makeover of the design. The navigation was confusing, the structure was unclear and the brand design was outdated. I led the complete redesign of the platform.
The homepage didn't give any information about the tools and the data of OEC.
We included a dynamic "newest data" table in the header to generate more traffic on the profile page and highlight the real value of OEC, which is the data pipeline that allows them to have the most recent data.
> Data Explorer
The Dataexplorer was an underestimated asset. It was used internally by the engineers to organize and filter datasets. The UI and functioning were very obscure. We decided to offer this tool to users, to give us the ability to build customized datasets, and then integrated the API into their own analytical tool.
For this, we needed to make the interface more user-friendly. I rand user studies, gave them tasks, and observed their behavior to understand their frustrations and goal. Based on these insights, I proposed a newly designed ith a more intuitive way to select, filter, and cut datasets.
For this, we needed to make the interface more user-friendly. I rand user studies, gave them tasks, and observed their behavior to understand their frustrations and goal. Based on these insights, I proposed a newly designed ith a more intuitive way to select, filter, and cut datasets.
> Trend explorer
Based on the Value proposition study, we created a new OEC analytics tool called Trend explorer. This feature allows premium users to access the latest data, visualize it, interact with it, disaggregate it (by region, destination, or product), and save the visualization on their account.
BUSINESS AND MARKETING STRATEGY
> Freemium business model
The platform was entirely free and cost the company in workforce and servers. We identified that the real value-added compared to the competition was the late data.
We create a freemium business model, where the majority of the website remains free and open, while additional features that we used internally: the data explorer nd the possibility to bulk download large amounts of clean data are pro and premium features.
The business model is validated, as we saw impressive growth of customers since its launch.
> Social media campaigns
We created several marketing campaigns to get the OEC platform known by a larger amount of users.
We identified Twitter and Linkedin as the key social media to run these campaigns. I contributed alongside the marketing team to the creation of visual and written content, as long as the overall strategy and planning of the posts.
We planned 2 types of posts and content creation:
- OEC features: video and gifs tutorial of new features
- Data into stories: A team of economists and editors are asked to find international trade trends and transform OEC data into new insightful stories. These stories gave birth to a blog section in the OEC, now often quoted as an authority.
- Social media: a presence and traction on various social media (twitter, reddit, Instagram) attract various types of users to the platform and create authority.
- Game Design: Design fun simple games such as Trivia and Trade, easy to share and understand, allowing an important flow of users (trade lovers) to be brought to the OEC every day.
> Roadmapping Strategy
I started to work on OEC at the beginning of 2021, I used this time to do the primary design and market research and help develop the offer and product improvement for the Launch of the new version in June 2021. Several design sprints and milestones were focused on a different part of the product (new datasets, new navigation, new features) and implemented and tested in an agile way with the developers. We started to see significant growth and retention of premium users 6 months after the launch date.
