Starting Over
The Story of Tagged Redesign
Tagged was a Social Network with a critically broken experience. Here’s how I helped fix it.
Tagged was a Social Network with a critically broken experience. Here’s how I helped fix it.
It was pretty clear for the executive team that the brand was outdated and needed a refresh.
Revisiting the brand from A to Z was also the starting point for major product redesign across all platforms. It appeared to me that whatever we would create, the result would have a significant impact on the design.
After few weeks of gathering information across the company, I had a precise idea of what the expectation was: a simple shape users could immediately identify, that also carried forward the spirit of the previous logo.
The honey comb was brought to life.
During logo conception, I went through more than 200 font faces and tried many basic shapes from square to circle.
The result is simple elegant and the perfect logical evolution of previous logo.
In parallel with new logo development I started to work on the graphic voice and tone of the brand.
I implemented a comprehensive
style guide.
Typography, colors, design constraints, everything was clearly documented.
This document has been shared and used by marketing, developers and teams throughout the company.
It was time now to imagine and start sketching early UX concepts.
While I was putting the last touch to the style guide, the team and I conducted research and interviewed select core users.
Armed with feedback, we started to work on the user experience to make it simple without sacrificing what people loved about it.
White board sessions and sketches became our daily life.
As soon as I knew we had something solid, we started to work on high fidelity wireframes for testing.
In the meantime, we were redefining the UX for iOS and android. We started to translate our concept to web and mobile to be sure we will offering a consistent experience across all platforms and devices.
After iterating with both product and engineering teams, we were finally ready to jump on design phase. Meanwhile, development could start building what was needed based on our wireframe models.
Once all screens were designed, I proceeded to style the design. I opted for a sleek interface that was mostly gray with a few pop colors for main calls to action.
I designed an extensive spec and screenshot collection to guide engineers in implementing the vision
Once the engineers assembled the first version of the mobile app, we initiated a soft release with select users.
We conducted thorough testing and iterating to prepare the application for full launch.
Post-launch results have been highly encouraging: The App ranking has climbed from 2.5 to 4 stars.
Download rate has increased by 5%. User retention is 15% greater and DAU has also grown by more than 7%.
There were definitely challenges with designing this app. There are many
moving parts and unknown elements within the Tagged product. It has also been difficult for such a
lean team to work on a social site that spans across so many platforms--
desktop, mobile app, iPhone app, and Android app. Given the design and engineering constraints we had, there is undoubtedly still room to improve the app.
However, the results are clear- users are loving the app and returning again and again to
discover and share content with each other. It was great to redesign and help