Select Page

Empowering Creators

GRIN is a creator management platform helping brands connect to creators for authentic marketing.

Our team explored a new use case, affiliate marketing, where a brand could work with more creators to scale.

Problems

Creators wanted affiliate links to multiple products on a shopping site.

  • Marketing managers had to make the links (sometimes hundreds) and email them to creators.
  • Creators saw links listed by URL, making them hard to recognize at a glance.

Solution

Empower creators to generate their own links, saving marketing managers hours of work. Display those links with context.

My Role:

Lead UX Designer (strategy, design)

Methods:

Customer Interviews, User Flows, Wireframes, UI Design

Tools:

Figma, Miro, Dovetail, Zoom, Spark Design System

Partners:

Product Manager, Engineering Lead,  Engineers

Research + User Flows

    Interviews with marketing managers helped us map the old flow, which was:

    • Time intensive for marketing managers
    • Frustrating for creators who had to wait

    My new flow empowers creators to make their own affiliate links instantly.

    The before flow with 7 steps and the new flow with 3 steps

    Iteration

    In addition to the affiliate link, we added context by showing product titles and images gathered from open graph meta tags.

    I explored different design options:

    • showing information in a list or cards
    • including the image or not
    • including labels on the buttons or relying on icons only

    Design

    Most creators use their phone, so I designed the UI mobile-first, and then worked with my engineers to make it responsive.

    We added the cards to our design system in Figma and React.

    Learnings

    After launching, we noticed some of the scraped titles did not provide enough context.

    In the next cycle, we added:

    • a way for creators to write their own title when they add the link
    • a way to edit any existing title

    Outcomes

    This feature remove a major adoption barrier for customers wanting to use our platform for affiliate marketing.

    • within 4 months, 42% of our customers were using this new feature
    • one customer had over 1,000 links made the week before Black Friday, something the marketing manager would not have been able to accomplish before

    “Anika’s unwavering dedication to the customer experience ensured that every user interaction was meticulously optimized.”

    Cameron Sheya,
    Senior Product Manager, GRIN

    Anika’s Advice

    Solving a user problem often solves a business problem. In this case, making a process more efficient increased retention and adoption.