Overview
Bloomfire is a B2B SaaS knowledge management platform that helps organizations to capture, share, and organize information and knowledge within their teams. A key feature is the ability to create and manage content.
Enterprise customers, especially those with high-security standards, require a transparent content approval workflow and audit trail. Bloomfire's inability to provide a comprehensive and organized approval workflow has resulted in lost deals. The current process lacks clarity, organization, and transparency, leaving users uninformed at critical stages.
Role & Team
As the sole designer, I collaborated with a cross-functional team consisting of:
Research
To determine the needs of our users, I:
Participated in customer calls alongside the PM to gather requirements.
Collaborated with the Customer Success team to collect user feedback.
Tracked user behavior using Pendo analytics.
Analyzed data provided by the Engineering team.
The following issues were identified in the previous workflow:
Organization
Problem
There was no centralized place for moderators to efficiently manage posts for approval. Moderation items were mixed with other tasks, making them easy to overlook.
Posts were also sent to all moderators in a community, resulting in excessive notifications for users. As a result, many of these posts went unattended, leading to a significant backlog of unapproved content.
Solution
I designed a moderation hub and workflow that would allow:
Admins to see all posts currently in moderation within the community
Moderators to see all posts assigned to them for them to act on
Authors to see their posts that are pending approval
User Testing
I conducted a usability test with 6 participants to validate the intuitiveness and ease of completing key moderation tasks in my design solutions. The tasks included:
Authors: View your most recent post pending approval, edit it using the moderator's comment, and resubmit it for approval.
Moderators: Review and approve the most recent post sent to you for approval.
Moderators had no major concerns, but authors initially had difficulty finding the moderation page. They first visited the ‘All Posts’ section on their Profile page but eventually located the moderation page. Due to technical and time constraints, we had to postpone redesigning the ‘All Posts’ section for a more intuitive experience. In the meantime, we used emails and notifications to assist users.
One user expressed confusion about distinguishing between returned posts and pending ones. To address this, we introduced a sortable ‘Status’ column to enhance clarity for both authors and moderators.
Improving Efficiency
Problem
Moderating posts is time-consuming. Moderators need to individually view each post on a new page, approve it, and then go back to the tasks page to view other items.
Moderators prematurely approve or reject posts through shortcuts from email or in-app notifications.
Solution
A preview modal easily accessed via the “View” button on the table contains all moderation info and necessary actions. This speeds up the workflow by allowing moderators to quickly act on items and return to the table to view other items.
An enhanced workflow that encourages prior review of posts before taking action, while still offering a shortcut through bulk actions.
A quick reassignment feature enables users to easily reassign posts to new moderators. The reassignment action can also be accessed in the post preview modal, but multiple ways to perform the same action quickens the workflow for power users and allow for bulk management of posts.
Gaining User Trust
Problem
Transparency throughout the moderation process was a major concern for users. Users weren’t provided with adequate information and record of moderation events.
Solution
I added the following features to increase user trust:
a detailed history of moderation events
a notes trail between authors and moderators, with links to the specific note being referenced
confirmation banners, with a link to the moderation hub to increase the exposure of untended items
I also added messages to increase user confidence. Users were already frustrated with the current moderation process, and these messages provided users with reassurance of their actions.
Design System
I worked within a design system and also created new, WCAG-accessible components. I promoted the adoption of Figma’s variants feature and improved the efficiency of the design process, which was especially helpful for creating tables. I also cleaned up the design system file to make it more organized and inventoried all existing components to ensure consistency across the product.
Accessibility
Targeted Guides
I created different guide paths for moderators and authors to improve feature adoption by informing users about the feature update and its main uses.
Results
Within a week after our February 15th, 2023 release, we’ve already had 395 users visit the new Moderation page from 158 different communities with an average daily visit duration of 5 minutes and 3 seconds on the page per user.
Due to time constraints, we prioritized certain features for the initial version, deferring others for future updates. Postponed features include multi-stage workflows, automatic approver selection, prioritization of content reviews, and exportable audit history.
Notable success metrics and quotes from important customers include:
