Why memes?

Meme culture has fast taken a rise over the years, with a noticeable boom during the pandemic, one of the ways people communicated effectively is through memes. Its shareability makes them popular because people find them relatable.

The goal

The business had an existing product that wasnt scaling and with only functions that allowed the user to download existing memes that had been uploaded and the target market wasn’t buying into it. We were tasked with coming up with new features and updates that showed user needs had been identified accordingly. To increase reach, improve retention and commercial value. I worked on design and strategy with the product manager, design team, engineering, growth, markerting and editorial to bring this to life.

Impact

20% increase in zmemes members

Improvement on uptake of existing zikoko products

Preparing for take-off

In order to come up with objective and scalable solutions, we began research to gain more clarity on the tasks at hand

Analyzing the current dilemma

We began by auditing the existing platform to draw out issues and these were some of the discoveries made

Poor navigation

Slow loading time

Poor visual balance

Contrast issues

Not enough context for memes

Improvement on uptake of existing zikoko products

Improvement on uptake of existing zikoko products

We then set out to analyze our competition, what are they doing right or wrong ? how can we be better ?

Deciding Research Methods

Considering the nature of the project, we decided to reach out to all types of meme users, not categorizing the frequency of use. This was done in order to improve our reach and impact across board.

Setting up the screener survey

The goal of the survey was to narrow down our vision, we reached out to participants in our focus groups, to discover active to occasional meme users, as well as fans who actively follow zikoko content across all platforms

Tests and Interviews

In carrying out semi qualitative interviews and moderated usability tests the aim was to determine users pain points with the existing product and needs that might exist for improvement.

Some insights from the moderated usability tests :

No feedback after performing certain actions like downloading a meme.

No tags on images to improve search and identification experience

Difficulty finding the search bar

Infinite scroll

Problems with hierachy and aesthetics

Some insights from the user interviews :

All participants use whatsapp stickers and source memes from twitter

Some use images and GIFs

Most leisure users use memes to  facilitate conversation

Into the thick of it

Here we synthesised all the data from research and used the findings to have a clearer view of the product and prioritise features to present to key stake holders.

Some of which include:

Create a community- have user profiles, scoreboard etc

Infinite scroll

Image information

Categorisation

Leave comments on memes

Like and save memes

Edit memes

Prioritise keyboard application and sticker packs to deliver memes closer to user conversation

We then worked on flows for the overall experience and each feature we planned to build

Low Fidelity

An initial low fidelity was presented to the team and stakeholders to showcase the structure and journey of what the site will be like. This was so as to iterate early on and implement necessary changes.

Creating the style guide

The idea was to come up with something fun, futuristic and African inline with the zikoko brand. We wanted assets that communicated our culture and uniqueness and after several deliberations, these are some of the items we came up with to improve our tone and feel

Headway, finally

.Our first iteration was not loved by stakeholders as they felt we over-executed the style, we discussed and had to re-assess. Our next iteration was a much cleaner version, which ticked all the boxes in terms of feature optimisation and visual improvements. We then paired with growth and marketing to discuss launch plans and create awareness to over 20,000 users.

Some key features include:

Sign on

The sign on page showing certain memes you can have access to, it helps improve familiarity with the site, we also prioritised social sign on as its easier for users, and most of the meme users are active on socials.

Improved navigation, architecture and hierachy

Now users had a clearer view of the primary action, memes are now tagged and separated into categories, users can now have a more optimised search experience, ads are now less obtrusive, with an easier access to profile and more actions, all in a bid to improve the experience

Profile and gamification

Now users had a clearer view of the primary action, memes are now tagged and separated into categories, users can now have a more optimised search experience, ads are now less obtrusive, with an easier access to profile and more actions, all in a bid to improve the experience

Comments

In a bid to improve engagement, users can now leave comments on memes posted and receive responses on their posts, this strengthening community and sense of ownership

Edit your meme

With installation of a software on the platform, users now had the ability to edit memes by adding captions, changing colors and so on, you could also edit existing memes by using the “remix” feature

Visibility of existing products

On viewing a meme, in addition to captions and comments you can also view existing zikoko articles related to that meme, in a bid to improve conversion and visibility of other products of the business

Key takeaways

The discoveries made during this project made me appreciate better how memes affect our day to day lives. It was also fun and challenging working in a diverse team.

Considerations

Language- tone of voice

Designing for dark mode

Ad optimisation

Next steps

Keyboard app optimisation