Imgur | Mobile Creation
Imgur is a social entertainment platform with more than 60 billion page views a month across web and mobile.
Background
Content is king at Imgur. We have a passionate community of users who not only browse and comment on content, but create and submit content. Historically, content creation and submission were done almost unanimously through the desktop site. As a company driving toward "mobile first", we identified the lack of submissions via mobile as an area of improvement.
Goal
Increase public uploads via mobile by 10% with a 4 week timeline
Results
Increased public uploads via mobile by 200%
My Role
I was the lead designer on this project working with a product manager.
Identifying the problems
First things first, I needed to break apart the current in-app flow. I wanted to figure out: Where are the blockers? What is stopping users from submitting via mobile and choosing desktop? What about new users, who are unfamiliar with desktop and Imgur in general, what is uploading like to them? Do they even do it?
Research
Now that we have a better idea of UX blockers for upload, I wondered what makes it so simple and easy on other apps. I also wanted to know what type of content was being uploaded most frequently on Imgur and how to optimize for it (spoiler alert, it was a 12-way tie). A look into the competitive landscape and a dive into our data gave me the answers.
Time to ideate!
Once I had gathered all the information and insights I needed, it was time to ideate. I started by sketching out a few different pieces of this upload puzzle. How to best showcase 12 different types of content was a huge problem that needed solving. As well as getting the user to post as quickly and efficiently as possible. After I had a few good starting points sketched out, I moved into wireframing, which helped me more quickly refine flows and overall architrecture.
UI & Prototyping
After I had the initial layout and functionality figured out in the wireframes, it was time to move into UI. While working on the UI I also wanted to do some quick prototyping in Principle. Since the post creation was a more complex task, prototyping helped ensure the interaction patterns and flows were consistent. I was also able to use this prototype for initial stakeholder and dev feedback.