Instasite

Problem

How do you design an experience that helps busy people create a website in minutes?
While there are different DIY solutions to building a simple website, many of these tools still require a degree of familiarity with tech and how websites work and are structured, and may take a whole lot of time to use.

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My Role

As Product Design Lead, I conducted user research, created user journeys, wireframes, and high fidelity designs, an interactive prototype and a developer handoff guide. As the sole Product Designer on the project, it was my task to conduct extensive user research and formulate an approach and determine features to go with the lean MVP.

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Goal

A sitebuilder that simplifies website building for non-techy and/or busy individuals, further than Wordpress, Wix or Squarespace already does.

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User Research & Discovery

The client has been in business for more than 10 years, providing web hosting, domain and website design services to thousands of users across many countries in Africa. Old correspondences between the internal web design team and hundreds of previous clients on webs design projects of various scales provided an opportunity to learn about the pain points in setting up a new website. Among all, the challenge of content and media curation stood out. Simply put, many small business owners did not think they had the time and knowledge to properly craft text copy for their websites. Hence this was a ripe problem to solve.

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Approach

I proposed, designed and tested different ways to solve the content curation challenge, what stuck was the use of an intelligent wizard, that asks the user a series of questions and is able to populate the website with text generated from their answers. With a deep integration with Copy.ai API service, text can be revised intelligently and the user presented with different versions to choose and edit if they wish. 

This wizard beings everytime by first asking “What type of website do you want to build?”, which accepts one of multiple choices and as well accepts a custom, typed input to allow for flexibility. The next series of questions are determined by which option the user entered in the first question.

For media and design content including, stock photography and video, and icons / graphics illustrations, I proposed and designed an integration with free image platforms, Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay, icons and illustrations from Flaticon via the API services. As a former software engineer, I was able to borrow on my engineering experience to research the availability and viability of these API services.

With modularity in mind, webpages were broken into sections and these sections were structured similar to LEGO blocks - you are able to stack them in  amost any order,

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Usability Testing

Figma prototypes were provided to testing participants and we observed how users interacted with the prototypes. This led to further iterations to improve the experience.

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Impact

On release, this product alone increased the company’s local addressable market 1000x and created a global addressable market that didn’t previously exist in a substantial way, as the company now has a product that can be used by anyone anywhere.

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