Goodpoint

2020-2022 | Senior UX designer

My role

  • Visioned the product in the conception stage

  • Designed the core UX

  • Established & evolved the Goodpoint design system

  • Instrumented a UX process with a focus on research

  • Delivered high-quality implementation

Background

Typical social media across the globe were plagued by misinformation. It’s difficult to have informed or constructive arguments on most topics.

Goodpoint

A new model

Goodpoint is a social thought platform. At its core, it consists of a inter-linked corpus with facts and opinions, the ability to construct ideas based on it and back to the corpus, and the user’s agreeing & sharing behaviors to create social influence.

My approach

The need for a vision

When I joined the startup, the company was loosely operated as a part-time business consists of:

  • The foundational, complicated theory

  • A proof-of-concept, broken UI

  • Scattered past research

  • Part-time employees, including CEO

  • General ambition with genuine concerns

Visionary design is the perfect tool to showcase the product potential, align the team, and bring back excitement.

The vision

Within 3 weeks, I quickly ramped up and created an animated prototype and presented it to the Chief Design Officer and the CEO.

The goal was to:

  • Turn the obscure theory into intuitive UX concepts

  • Make serious things delightful  

The turning point

Following the vision setting, I began to design the key user experience for the beta launch.

The team loved the design. It visualized years of thinking for the first time, set the vision for the product, and brought inspiration back to the table. 

Most notably, upon seeing the full prototype for the first time, the CEO realized its full potential and decided to transform the company from a part-time gig to a full-speed startup. 

This visionary design was the turning point and kicked off Goodpoint. 

Design key user journeys

Working with Chief Design Officer, the team identified 5 main MVP focus areas. We followed the agile UX process including concept, UX research, iteration and final deliverables.

Users types and user needs

Working closely with the user researcher, the team identified 3 main personas:

  • Highly analytical, thesis building

    • Dig deep into a topic and seek sources and references

    • Save to create a personal mind library

    • Impact others via sharing, writing and discussion

  • Understand enough to feel informed

    • Get a sense of a topic to feel informed

    • Get to facts without digging

    • Casually save / share

  • Just know what’s going on

    • Glimpse topics

    • Focus on life-related topics and rarely global / deep topics

    • Share personal experience that echo with them

#1: Reader UX

The first focus area is the reader's UX, which includes the homepage, the idea view, the author page, the follow system, and the search. We went through numerous rounds of design iterations to perfect these features.

#2: Writer UX

An assistive writing experience for writers to build up high-quality ideas using existing ideas and content from the corpus

#3: Account

User’s personal data & collection, and controls & knobs to make the system work better for them.

#4: Onboarding

Since this is a new app, and it is a new concept. I want to help users quickly be alert about how it works and help them learn the value and the values they can get from this product.

#5: Design system

The design system is built on day 1. It includes components, interaction patterns, visual and typography guidelines for consistency, scalability, and engineering velocity.

Challenges

Introduce a novel mental model

The model has its roots in academia isn't the easiest for consumer users to grab on. The design itself was a huge challenge - present a familiar and friendly UX while still maintaining the core value.

Earn trust from the ground up

Most of the team members didn’t have direct experience working with UX design, so I had to prove the value of UX via process setting and proactive sharing and discussion. 

Remote work

Most of the work was done during the pandemic. As a result,  all of the discussions and co-design exercises were done virtually. 

Impact

Launched product

Alpha version was launch in Dec 2020 after a year of iterative design, research and development. Beta public access version was launched in July 2021.

Visit: www.mygoodpoint.com

Positive user feedback

The design was met with very positive user feedback in the final iteration, per user research.