top of page
top

Sermo: membership engagement

INTRODUCTION

Sermo, a prominent social network for physicians, sought to boost engagement on their platform. The existing posting system for the Sermo team posed challenges, with posts getting lost in the feed and limited design options. The goal was to create a versatile card system that allowed the growth team to share posts more effectively while maximizing user engagement.

OBJECTIVES

  • Improve engagement over the previous system
  • Enhance the design and behavior of posts to stand out in the platform feed
  • Enable the growth team to create various card types that fit within few layouts but remain distinctive
sermo-banner.png

Here is the homepage of the physician membership platform before the changes were made. In the center is an example of a growth team post which would look just like a member post except for the pulse logo avatar.

PROJECT SCOPE

The project involved revamping the membership-facing cards and the admin side for the growth team to create the cards. The card system was designed to accommodate different post types, such as promotions, community highlights, and partnerships. It aimed to minimize engineering work for faster delivery by retaining core features and functions and only adding the most necessary.

RESEARCH

Research encompassed analyzing the current capabilities of posts and studying how other companies managed similar content. Valuable insights were gleaned from this exploration, influencing the final design decisions.

This project became far reaching in terms of behavior, looking into frequency, pinning, segmentation, and types of cards from promos to community highlights to partnerships. We ended up tailoring it down for the MVP but had a depth of exploration to move into later.

Above are three examples of the mapping I did to see how the cards would translate from admin to design, the layout of the card components to compare to each other, and frequency options.

LESSONS LEARNED

When looking back on this, I can see how I spent too much time mapping out the different variables and options from how often a post will show to which type should have the ability to expand or have fine print. I spent time categorizing which cards would have what structures and their overlaps and prototyping how the feed would look with three frequency settings. Much of this was reduced or eliminated in the end. All the exploration helped me to make sense of the boundaries, but I should have kept going back the developmental limits and simplify the questions and solutions. This project is made to be ongoing and expansive, so I do feel like the extensive exploration will help moving forward thought it could have been simplified.
sermo-banner2.png

This is a couple sections of the admin side of making the cards. The admin platform was engineered without user experience in mind, so there were a few parts that were not intuitive that still had to remain the same for the timeline we had.  

THE RESULT

The outcome was a comprehensive system of cards that not only provided a wide range of engaging post types but also allowed the growth team to create them independently. 

The session length increased by 32% with a notable uptick of 153% in the number of posts viewed Year over Year within the G7 countries. This change seems to indicate that users dedicated more time to scrolling and engaging with content, likely due to the improved targeting and relevance of the content being offered.

Members could now discover Sermo team posts more easily, and the Sermo team could share content in a more appealing manner, leading to better user engagement.

This shows the consistency and versatility of the final cards when they are in a closed state. 

 

bottom of page