Developed
Brand Connect
Developed Developed a new design system for a responsive web experience, creating a seamless UI/UX that helps influencers connect with brands. The ultimate solution for campaign partnerships — diversity, autonomy, and convenience all in one to users for monetising the affiliate experience.
Role Lead Design
Platform PC, Mobile Web (Responsive web)
Year May 2022 - Nov 2023
Team 2 Product Designers, 2 UX researchers, 1 Product Owner, 2 Engineers
Brand Connect is an affiliate marketing platform that connects between influencers such as Instagramers, YouTubers, Naver bloggers, etc, and brands. It empowers campaign partners to directly connect with a diverse range of creators specialised in niches like fashion, beauty, food, travel, and lifestyle without the need for intermediaries. It offers transparent insights into each creator’s popular content and influence metrics, allowing brands to make informed decisions.
Campaign partners also have the freedom to customise discount rates, commission structures, and content publishing terms, ensuring maximum flexibility and control over each campaign.
Through easy influencer search and discovery, campaign partners can propose collaborations or recruit creators that best align with their brand identity. They can choose between two flexible models:
**Branded content is a marketing strategy where advertisers create content to promote brand awareness and connect with their audience.
Background
Brand Connect originally started as a feature within the Influencer Centre, allowing brands and influencers to easily explore and form partnerships. However, as the creator advertising market rapidly expanded, the partnership process became increasingly complex, leading to the addition of multiple new features. As a result, navigation became challenging, making it difficult not only for users but also for designers to understand the overall structure.
To improve the service, we need to focus on monetising it and enhancing the influencer experience. The goal is to transform the platform from being just part
of the Influencer Centre into a more seamless and comprehensive affiliate experience.
Problem
Since Brand Connect wasn't a standalone platform, it became increasingly complex with added features and information within simple pages filled with constant modal pop-ups, overwhelming users with a confusing UX flow and inconsistent UI elements.
To address these challenges, we began with a design audit, closely following the user flow to gain a deeper understanding of the users perspective. The primary issue we discovered was that as new features were continually added, the UX flow became increasingly complex and tangled, making navigation difficult for users. Additionally, inconsistencies in visual elements—such as the same line styles being used with different colors—disrupted the overall design harmony. This lack of consistency extended to colors, font sizes, and icons, further impacting usability.
Project Goal
Our approach was to simplify the experience, following the principle:
the more complex it gets, the simpler it should be
Our goal was to streamline the user experience by simplifying navigation and ensuring users could complete tasks effortlessly. As complexity increased, we focused on making interactions more intuitive while maintaining a consistent and cohesive design system. These approach is both influencers and brands is allowed to connect
Impact
Influencers 11K+
Brands 2.3K+
Empowered over 11K partners and 2.3K+ Smart Stores, Brand Stores, and advertising agencies to seamlessly collaborate through Brand Connect, accounting for 42% of partnership revenue, approximately £5.8 million.
Why do we build a Design System and redesign?
1. Adding features makes UX become increasingly complex.
The below image is the previous old version design. We know the need to go back to the initial stage of the user flow to gain a better understanding. There are many hiding functions and confusing design elements even designers don’t know. We thoroughly reviewed all the service pages and made a comprehensive list of UX/UI improvements. The main problem was as features kept being added, the UX flow became increasingly complex and tangled. In this phase, we discovered pain points in the user journey and identified problems by conducting usability tests.
2. Brand Connect has three page views, Brand, influencer, and user(neither influencer nor company).
Brand Connect offers three distinct page views depending on the user's login authentication: one tailored for Brand companies, another for influencers, and a third for regular users. These interconnected design pages have similar layouts but have a distintive UI elements and UX flow. Therefore, It was essential to manage various pages with common UI design elements and usability for consistency.
3. Without a design system guide, build up subtle alterations at the designer's discretion.
As the platform expands, establishing well-defined standards and guidelines has become crucial. Without a design system guide, we have continued to build up subtle alterations at the designer's discretion. As the platform expands, it is essential to make clear standards and guidelines. Designers might unintentionally introduce variations in colour and size based on personal preferences and interpretations. For example, the brand's primary colour(#FF8328) and the text colour(#FF7612) are designed to be subtly different, text colour usually is a little bit darker and more apparent than the primary colour. If you are not in charge of the designer, this is possibly the incorrect application of text colour to the primary colour.
All components are classified into modules with characteristics by UI cases, simplifying the process of importing and using them efficiently for developers and other designers. We save time and resources for design and development when modifications are needed.