top of page

DISCIPLE MEDIA

Project overview

Leading SaaS platform for delivering private custom community applications for Android and iOS.

Disciple Media offered content creators a truly exciting and cost effective platform for hosting and monetising their communities.

The ability to go from concept to launch within weeks proved a truly exciting proposition for the new breed of digital creators who want full ownership of their data.

Role: Lead UX Designer

UX design tasks

​

  • Workshop facilitation

  • Ideation and sketching

  • Wireframing (Figma)

  • Prototyping (Figma)

  • UI collaboration

UX research tasks

​

  • Competitor analysis

  • Audit current products

  • Create a recommendations and sizing list

  • User testing

Overview


As global markets veered ever increasingly towards offering customers an array of self serve products, Disciple Media registered the need to investigate the potential for creating their own self serve model whilst keeping the integrity of their current client base intact.

The decision was made to offer users an entry level payment option and utilise a Progressive Web Application as a starting point for this new business.

I was brought in to develop the PWA version of their community application and scrutinise their iOS and Android offerings.

The Challenge

 

Speed of delivery and customisation was key to Disciple Media’s USP.

Unfortunately this can create an ungainly maintenance headache and break user centric best practice:
 

  • Contrasting IA structures resulting in large scale framework inconsistencies

  • Divergent site hierarchies

  • No single source of truth

  • No user testing of any kind

  • More time dedicated to bug fixing than innovation


Work became very reactive, driven by a need to merely please the customer rather than guide them to establishing an industry leading format.

Honesty


I spent some time familiarising myself with the Disciple platform. By feeding back directly to senior managment it was an opportunity to honestly audit their current offering and bypass any internal politics.

Recommendations
By showing examples of pain points versus best pactice and by providing alternatives that were not based on technical limitations some broader thinking could take place.

Once I had buy-in from the managment team I could propose concepts to the greater development team and run workshops that could push the team outside of their comfort zones and generate greater options and understanding as to what it was the team was trying to achieve.

Workshops

Having multi-disciplinary teams working together to critically assess their own work and present ideas in a non formal format is so hugely helpful in the development cycle. Teams learn from each other, they create awareness of each others challenges but help break the silo approach to rapid development.

 

Once we had established concensus on what our key findings were we could work these into the product roadmaps. For us this meant, onboarding was a critical feature, user flows were written and re-written then ultimately tested on users to see if our assumptions would bear fruit.

Solving the tech


In every company you are limited by the knowledge in house, the willingness to adapt and timescales.

 

Small teams limitations can be its greatest asset, we found that once the technology team could have a dialogue we all understood the walls between teams came crashing down leading to innovations which would rely heavily on merely UI adjustments and perceptions than actual coding.

 

This meant problems were being solved without any major shakeup of the backend systems and the distrust and animosity each team had for each other fell away.

Disciple Media User Flow Options became a critical component in establishing our own best practice.

User flow options

The beauty of software like Figma is that you are able to iterate quickly and in realtime.

 

I found teams responded differently to mapped out user journeys versus prototypes. Being able to offer both helped clarify the interaction design.

Visibility

The added bonuswith cloud based software is that all members of the development team from Product Owners to Designers and Technical teams could have a clear idea of progress that was being made.


This proved invaluable in a team where there were multiple members offshore and by keeping channels focused to tasks rather than teams, a slightly more seamless marrying of resources could take place.


Wireframing proved crucial to determining scale of implementations and by sharing out libraries and giving all team members the ability to create there within Figma, iterations could be enhanced and acted on much more effectively.

What was achieved?

 

In my short time at Disciple Media I felt proud of the fact the team for the most part was willing to adopt new improved ways of working, address communication blockages and stop falling into negative patterns. 

​

Improvements of the platform included:

  • Full PWA userflow source of truth

  • Interface enhancments

  • Interaction enhancments

  • Onboarding and dashboard simplification

  • Regular testing protocol

  • Agile based stand ups

  • Branding improvements


Conclusion

Naturally the objective of any UX designer is to achieve three things, create fantastic user experiences, nail the business objectives and seamlessly please both sides of the equation.

 

The reality is that the job usually entails large degrees of political juggling, mentoring and objective decision making whilst adhereing to your own core principles.

 

For me those principles are based on experience, sometimes you also need to step back at let teams navigate the digital delivery landscape in their own way, it may be infuriating to see the same stumbling blocks rear up but its always educating to see how these are overcome.

 

As a digital startup, many mistakes will be repeated but working with a young and motivated team certainly restored my faith in digital as a vibrant and exciting place to work filled with hugely talented fun individuals.

bottom of page