Amity Communities

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Amity is a communities platform to enable like-minded people to discuss trending topics, breaking news and live events.

Platforms: IOS, Android, Tablets, and Web Application
Role: Co-Founder, Head of Product Design (Product Management)


Highlights:

• Co-founded Amity Worldwide Pty Ltd

• The company raised $2 million in investment funding

• Scaled the company to 14 people.

• The app has been featured multiple times on the Apple app store, design blogs like Beautiful Pixels and many other major publications around the world.

My Role

My role as the Head of Product Design (Product Management), includes product design direction and product management, bringing the product from ideation to production. I worked with the product, design, marketing, and engineering teams to ensure product design solutions aligned with product vision and business strategy.

My day-to-day included:

• Product/UX/UI design

• Management of the design team

• Product management

• Product discovery

• Product vision, road map, and strategy

• Product prioritisation

• Market research and user analysis

• User flow and journey mapping

• Design system and DesignOps

• Product quality assurance and testing

• Design analysis/User testing

• Product and design experiments

• Branding and company identity (Including marketing collateral)

The Problem

Businesses, influencers, artists, YouTubers, brands, news publications, content creators are facing challenges engaging with people via traditional social networks with unpredictable reach, minimal engagement, and expensive costs.

Solution

Amity is a platform for communities to come together around the world. It allows anyone to instantly create or join public conversations, anytime and anywhere, enabling businesses to interact with their followers with live chat 24/7 and send a push notification at any time to their entire audience. All in one place.

Below are 5 points we focused on tackling the problems of traditional social networks:

1. Reducing the noise of the post feed system by introducing communities and creating a more focused discussion around common interests points.

2. Create a sense of belonging through smooth interactions between users

3. Optimising the discovery of new communities

4. Giving the creators more control of the notifications, by allowing creators to notify their followers directly of important news or contents

5. Creating unique features for communities such as events calendar, banners and count down timers, etc.

Product Alignment

To align the product, business and marketing strategies, weekly meetings were scheduled with all the directors. These meetings served as a platform to discuss significant updates, track progress, and determine the subsequent actions and directions for the company.

Team Process

With the growth of the company, adjustments were made to the processes and workflows between the product, design, and engineering teams, aiming to foster efficient collaboration while enabling individual productivity. Weekly meetings were established to assess the effectiveness of the most recent process and management implementations, enabling necessary improvements to be implemented. The process would adapt according to the specific requirements of the work, time constraints, team size, and product development stage, ensuring seamless communication and collaboration between teams.

Ideation to Production

My primary responsibility revolved around synthesizing ideas based on user feedback and the diverse needs and requirements of various teams while guiding the design process from initial concepts to seamless production. The following steps were implemented to facilitate this process:

1. Collecting ideas: Gathering user feedback and the needs, requirements, and goals of each team involved.

2. Design solution creation: Creating and overseeing the design process to develop solutions that align with the requirements and the overall business vision and goals.

3. Collaboration with engineering: Collaborating with the engineering team to assess the complexity and estimated timeframe for implementing different design solutions.

4. Iterative design process: Working with all teams to iterate on design solutions.

5. Regular discussions with the product team: Engaging in regular discussions with the product team to determine the most suitable designs to move forward with.

6. Collaboration with engineering during implementation: Working closely with the engineering team to ensure they have all the necessary information and assets to execute the design effectively.

7. Design adjustments during implementation: Making necessary design adjustments throughout the implementation process to streamline workflows or address any engineering issues that arise.

8. Design testing and evaluation: Testing the design to ensure it functions effectively and presents a strong visual impact, meeting the requirements outlined in the design brief.

9. Post-production evaluation and iteration: Analyzing data and monitoring the effectiveness of the design after it has been released to production, and using the insights gained to iterate and further enhance the design.

Design System: Consistency Between All Platforms

To achieve a cohesive UX and UI across various platforms (iOS, Android, tablets, and web), I collaborated closely with the design team to establish a universal design language. The main challenge was integrating our own design language and style within the native design frameworks of each platform. As the application progressed and evolved, regular meetings were scheduled to address two key aspects: enhancing overall consistency and determining the design approach for new features and components across all platforms.

The design language continuously evolved in response to the app's needs and requirements, ensuring consistency in the following areas:

1. Navigation: Defining how screens transition between one another.

2. App structure: Establishing the overall organization and layout of the app.

3. Color: Determining the color palette and its application.

4. Text size: Standardise the size of text elements.

5. Component style: Establishing consistent style for UI elements.

6. Animations: Establishing animation guidelines and effects.

7. Sound: Determining the appropriate use of audio feedback.

8. UX flows: Designing consistent seamless user experiences

Quality Assurance and Internal Testing

The ensure the excellence of UX and UI design and the quality of the latest developments, we establish a weekly internal product testing and feedback workshop. The objective is to intentionally push the app to its limits, actively searching for bugs and pinpointing potential design bottlenecks and issues. This workshop serves as a means for everyone within the company to familiarize themselves with the product being developed, comprehend the contributions made by one another, and additionally serve as a platform for collective discussion and ideation of problem-solving solutions.

Experiments, A/B Testing and Iterations

To consistently make informed decisions and enhancements to product design, we used data to gain insights into drop-off and conversation rates and other crucial metrics at specific sections of the app. Product experiments and A/B testing were used to determine the effectiveness of different product and design variants. Following a testing period, the most successful design was selected as the default for all users. This iterative process was repeated for each area targeted for improvement. The design, engineering, and data analysis teams collaborated closely to establish and implement the system for product and design experiments.

Deciding on a Solution to Implement and Test

Once we identified the specific issues and areas requiring improvement, we facilitated design workshops within the company to foster ideation and generate potential solutions. After all the ideas were collected, the product, design, engineering, and marketing teams collaboratively assessed and scored each solution based on criteria such as impact, time, cost, and resources. Solutions with the highest rankings and most aligned with the product metrics of success, user acquisition, and retention, were then subjected to design, development, and testing.

Measure of Success

Once the experiment had been implemented, to know if the experiment was successful we worked with a data analyst to ensure the product experiment results were statistically significant to be considered a success. In some cases, we saw a 5-30% improvement.

Learnings

Throughout the testing and iteration process, we have discovered that solutions that initially appeared promising can underperform, while those we had doubts about can yield the best results. Testing assumptions is crucial.

However, finding the right balance between metric performance and user experience is vital. While bombarding users with pop-ups may yield short-term increases in numbers, it can negatively impact long-term retention rates. Our objective is to leverage the insights gained from the experiments, identify successful elements, and design solutions that not only work effectively but also deliver a great user experience.