Duration
3 months (2024)
Role
Product Designer
Team
CEO
Product Designer
Product Manager
Engineer
At 1stCollab, we connect thousands of creators with brands to streamline influencer marketing. However, brands using 1stCollab were struggling to keep track of their tasks of approving creators' deliverables, due to tasks being scattered across the product within different campaigns and ad groups. This lack of centralized task management led to inefficiencies and delays in campaign execution, leading to stalled partnerships and frustrated creators.
Originally, tasks were scattered across the product within different campaigns and ad groups
Our challenge was clear: create a centralized, intuitive task management system that prioritized overdue items, reduced manual follow-ups, and ensured brand accountability.
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I teamed up with our CEO to gather insights from brand owners, social media managers, and marketing teams to uncover critical pain points.
For example, let's say a brand has a campaign with 3 different ad groups. With our former navigation structure, a brand user would have to open a campaign, and click into each ad group to complete the corresponding tasks. The process was tedious and time-consuming.
1stCollab’s terms specify auto-approvals if brands fail to take action within a set timeframe (e.g., 5 days for content approval). However, enforcement of these policies was inconsistent, leading to process bottlenecks. Additionally, brand delays could negatively impact creators.
With insights in hand, I explored solutions that would put brands in control while reinforcing responsibility.
Creating a unified tasks hubA larger project I was simultaneously working on at the time was a complete overhaul of the navigation sidebar. In the original nav, you can see that we had a double navigation system, and task types were buried under Ad Groups, which were buried under Campaigns. The new navigation design allowed us to consolidate all pages into one main navigation, where we then added a new Tasks page. This is where tasks will be centralized into one dashboard, making it effortless for brands to track what needed attention.
The tasks organizational structureWe knew that tasks had to be organized by the action type, as it was known that brands like to tackle similar actions at once. Understanding that brands often manage multiple campaigns simultaneously, we introduced a campaign filter to the Tasks page. This allows brands to quickly narrow down their tasks by campaign, ensuring they can focus on the most relevant work at any given time.
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Task page design iterations. We rapid tested these iterations with users, and found that the design on the left was the easiest for them to navigate.
Updating the tasks cardsThe original task cards contained both redundant and unnecessary information about the contract. Our goal was to simplify the task card as much as possible, while giving brands more insight on when certain things were due. For clear prioritization, tasks will be automatically sorted based on how long a creator had been waiting.
The new card design displayed:
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During the design process, we realized there will be times when creators require multiple types of actions from brands. For example, a creator might need both a referral link and a concept review. Initially, this created confusion for us, as we weren’t sure how to handle multiple tasks within the same contract without breaking the current structure that organized tasks by type.
I explored ways to display multiple tasks within a single task representation while keeping the interface clean and intuitive.
The solution we landed on:
This approach streamlined workflow, ensuring brands could efficiently complete all required actions for each creator without jumping around different pages and missing anything.
With the implementation of a new task page, we also wanted to treat messages as its own task so that brands would stay on top of responding to creators' messages.
Our long-term solution is to build a separate messaging feature within the platform. We realized that was an ambitious project of its own, so we descoped and landed on a simpler solution: adding in a "messages"Â tab that shows all tasks with unread messages.
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Eliminated brand delays
Within two months of launching the Tasks page, no brands were late on any of their tasks.
Reduced manual reminders to zero
Our CEO used to have to ping at least 5 brands a week reminding them to complete tasks. Since Tasks was launched, that number went down to 0.
Improved task completion rates
With clear deadlines and prioritization, brands took faster action. We saw an increase of creator partnerships getting completed on time.
This project proved that clarity, urgency, and accountability drive better user behavior. By transforming a scattered task system into a structured workflow, we not only improved efficiency but also strengthened brand-creator relationships. Looking ahead, we see opportunities to enhance automation further:
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