Expanding Tailwind's products for multi-channel success

I oversaw the design direction for a major design overhaul for Tailwind as we moved from separate single-channel products to one cohesive multi-channel platform.

Context:

Tailwind is a B2B SaaS company that makes social media marketing tools for small businesses, with a focus on soloprenuers. Most Tailwind members are bloggers, Etsy sellers, and small Shopify store owners.
Our primary products are focused on scheduling for organic social, like auto-posting for Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, hashtag suggestions, best times to post, and more.

Role:

UX Lead: I drove UX research, Information Architecture and overall UX strategy for this project.

Team:

1 Product Designer owned the visual UI design updates

Stakeholders:

Cross-functional squad of Product Managers, Product Marketing Manager, Engineers, VP of Product

Challenge:

Tailwind was built as a Pinterest publishing platform. As the product expanded to support other social media channels, it was done in a silo which resulted in users having to switch between each social media channel to create, schedule, and see reporting for each separate channel. As we embarked on a new suite of features that were multi-channel, we needed to overhaul the platform to create a cohesive user experience to allow users to create, schedule, and see reports across all their social media channels.

Research & Problem Definition

The research process involved 3 parts: customer interviews, competitive analysis, and quantitative data from a user insight survey. We used the research insights to craft a customer journey map of current scheduling flows and create a vision and hypothesis for what multi-channel support could be.

Discovery & Validation

To validate our hypothesis, we created a series of user flows and later, wireframe concepts to test with users. This was a complex project that involved a lot of coordination across several product squads and working closely with engineering to discuss architecture feasibility with the proposed concepts. Through rapid iteration, we were able to land on a final flow.

Build & Launch

The new designs were developed with our Engineering teams and released as a Beta to a small subset of new customers. Existing users had to option to opt into the new experience and we tracked how many switched back to monitor overall user acceptance. It was importantant to track activation rates from the old and new experience to ensure the new designs weren't hurting our key metrics.

Before:

After:

Beta User Testings

We continued user testing throughout the Beta period and were able to use these insights to iterate on the final product. The success of the Beta allowed us to roll out to 100% of users and we saw in an increase in WAUs as well as increased NPS scores.