case study - 2021
Mylio: creating a sharing experience at the intersection of design, marketing, and technical feasibility
10,000 feet
I lead a cross-team effort with client engineers, back-end engineers, marketing, and executives to build a sharing experience that both introduced a frequently requested feature and worked as the foundation for high-value marketing efforts. A seemingly simple web sharing experience that promoted the product and protected the privacy of the user, all while keeping ongoing costs low to us.
Dropbox has planted their flag with one of the smartest, most successful referral programs of all time. Between the years 2008 and 2010, they managed to double their user base every three months by offering a benefit to the user (more storage) if they referred someone.
It’s a fairly simple concept: give the user a reason to tell their friends. Give them something for signing up. Help incentivize the move to this new product.
These concepts became key in the building of Mylio’s sharing platform. Not only was the Mylio owned web-space an obvious candidate for a prominent Mylio advertisement, but it could also offer functionality specific to the Mylio client itself.
This idea led me through a multi-month project, asking every team in Mylio to come together and deliver something truly unique: a platform for sharing photos directly from Mylio with the ability for others to follow the share and get automatic updates when new photos are added.
My Design Process
To ensure that I was solving the right problems and that we created an experience that exceeded our user’s expectations, I used Nielson Norman Group’s Design Thinking design process. This process helped me understand and empathize with our user base, ideate on our ideas, rapidly prototype, test, and re-prototype until we were confident in the product we would ship.
Foundational Research
While our goal was to offer a unique sharing experience with Mylio, it was important to understand what our users wanted when sharing images and what our competitors were doing in this space.
My foundational research happened through three main avenues:
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Interviews
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Surveys
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Competitive Analysis
Interviews
I set up times to talk over Zoom with ten of our existing users to ask about their desire to, and expectations of, sharing from within Mylio. I also worked with our support team to find two people who had stopped using Mylio recently and had written about sharing in their exit survey.
Competitive Analysis
Sharing images is not a new experience, so I turned to our competition to see what they offered. I explored Apple, Google, and Adobe’s sharing options and compared them to get a baseline for what we offered.
Surveys
It was important to understand what types of images people were wanting to share with this new tool. I sent a survey to 100 active Mylio users asking about their interest in this feature and different ways that it could be implemented. Specifically, it was important to find out if they trusted Mylio to host their images and, if so, if they required full-sized originals to be shared since this would cost more than smaller, compressed versions.
Empathy Map
Based on the user interviews, I built an aggragate empathy map to ensure everyone working on this project was aligned with our users, their apprehensions, and their expectations. Since multiple developers, marketing personnel, and executives would all have a say in the outcome of web sharing, making sure we acted in the best interest of our users was critical.
Personas
By this time, I had a few personas built for Mylio. Using these foundations, I was able to adopt their current needs to the web sharing task since I tied each of my interviews to a specific persona.
These personas, much like the empathy map, helped drive decisions that were user focused when dealing with teams that didn’t always keep the user front and center.
User Stories
It would be easy for web sharing to balloon to a giant, prohibitively expensive project that would not only take a long time to build but also be too costly to maintain.
User stories helped us keep grounded when building the aspects of this feature, understanding the limitations of what we needed to develop and ensuring that we didn’t go too far too fast and offer functionality that wouldn’t be utilized but would be difficult to walk back.
These user stories helped us answer important questions like how many photos a free user may want to share versus a paid user, what quality they may want to share, and how long to host the images on our site for both privacy and cost reasons.
Early Ideation
Web sharing was to be integrated closely with the existing app, but the presentation, entry points, and flow were completely unique. I spent time coming up with some broad concepts of how this feature could work, then shared these concepts with my peers to get feedback and see if there were any standouts.
As expected, the ideal solution was a combination of a few different concepts. I began to loosely sketch a synthesized version of web sharing from my different takes to build something friendly and straight forward.
Internal Iteration
At this point I had a fairly idealized version of how I wanted web sharing to work. I presented the loose designs to our backend and app engineers in an attempt to figure out what we could feasibly offer to our users.
We discussed ways to cut costs that ended up as a huge net benefit: instead of hosting full size photos on the web, allow Mylio to Mylio communication so that one app could send large files to other Mylio users. We could then cut costs by hosting smaller versions on the web and drive people to download the app to receive the originals.
At this point it was time to get marketing involved as we were all excited about this concept and saw huge potential in attracting new users with it.
User Flow & Technical Outcomes
While the overall concept of web sharing was fairly straightforward, the addition of “following” albums and some of the choices we would offer (and the ramifications of those choices) meant that a user flow / technical flow would be necessary to understand all of the possible outcomes.
To start, I drew out the flow from the user’s perspective: what they would see and be doing as they walked through the web sharing process.
Next, I continued to work with our engineering team to define what would happen when specific things were done in the flow and documented it as a technical flow that I could hand off in the specification later.
Wireframes
With the flow defined and the low-fidelity design locked down, I began designing each screen of the web sharing process. This started as a roughly drawn wireframe which I then brought over to Figma. Once in Figma, I worked with our visual designer to finalize the iconography and other elements that aided the experience.
Mylio's standard album view with the new "SHARING" section within the right panel.
The Web Share customization panel where a user can set how they want to share their album to the web.
A new "split stage" where the non-shared albums are separated from the shared albums. This makes it easy to identify what type of albums you have.
The landing page for a shared album's web view. This includes the full length Mylio ad in the second row for free accounts.
A more populated album view to show how standard albums, shared albums, and followed albums all sit on the stage.
Prototypes
Prototyping was the final step before testing and iteration. I took the high-fidelity designs and began to put together a working prototype in Figma. This allowed my realistic user testing, ensure that our users understood the flow and the outcomes of using Web Sharing.
Takeaways
Web Sharing as a true team effort that brought together many different team members to find a solution that was feasible to implement, not prohibitively costly, and offered a unique value proposition that offered some level of vitality.
Working cross-team meant aligning everyone with the user and ensuring our goal was cohesive – and open communication and internal iteration is what brought about the end result that we are all proud of.
In the end, creating a familiar but unique experience was a combination of understanding user needs and balancing them with business needs and marketing opportunities. Mylio’s web share feature is unlike any feature we had designed so far and continues to further open the door for design, engineering, and marketing to complement one another.
