User Experience. Product Design. Design leadership. Product Strategy.

The Problem

Workweek is the home of some of the most informative and engaging professional newsletters around. As they looked to expand into interactive communities for each of their brilliant creators the Workweek product team partnered with my team at Tanooki Labs to translate product spec into reality.

Later, I rejoined the Workweek team as they looked to increase engagement with the Professional Network Platform that I’d designed for them with Tanooki Labs. In close coordination with the internal Product team and additional design resources we broke barriers to make the community even better than before.

The Solution

Part 1

I worked with the internal product team to develop an initial requirements document that would serve as the base for future iterations of the product. Close collaboration led to amazing results.

The product design we created includes messaging, feeds, and even a fully featured user generated library. A robust design system allows us to quickly develop additional communities after a short sprint for branding and accessibility requirements to ensure that all designs met WCAG AA standards.

Part 2

Nearly a year later I reconnected with the Workweek team as an independent contractor. The team wanted more than the standard message boards and content library, they wanted to leverage their strong AI categorization tools as well as help develop new user patterns to encourage new users to interact with each other right from the start. We began by getting rid of the standard Reply button on posts. Now each post is automatically categorized and receives context relevant reply buttons that populate the input field with helpful prompts. We also something entirely new - Private Replies. Now every post is equipped with a quick and easy way to start a Direct Message with the author, providing context to new conversations.

The Result

What had started as a product expecting to generate 20 - 30 memberships per month is instead generating 150 membership applications per day. And just as importantly, our design system has cut the initial product discovery cycle to 2 weeks, enabling product development to begin that much sooner.

New features have increased daily returning members by nearly 100%.