Cortex

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Visual Analytics - AI

AI Analytics, Trends, Social Media
About this project
Company
Cortex
Role(s)
UX Designer
UI Designer
UX Researcher
Graphic Designer
Tools
Pen & paper
Figma
Adobe Creative Suite
Summary, TLDR

Cortex uses AI to help marketers and creatives build a strong online presence. They could get a view into what is trending and what works for their competitors, and how they could improve their social media posts to increase their audiences engagement.

To help creatives know what to keep doing, what to change, and how to really grab their audiences attention I dive into creating recommendations for their content.

Skip to the solution!

Problem

Have you ever made a social post where you didn’t know if it would make an impact or not?

Many of Cortex’s customers came to us to help them narrow down their creative decisions. Their creative teams faced many decisions throughout their campaigns. These ranged from a photo’s contents, the colors used, the wording and emojis used in their captions, and branding impact. Often times they will have a dozen or more photos for one post, to choose from. We analyzed their content, their competitor’s content, and various industry contents to let them know what was trending and catching their audiences eye.

A fulfilled order with over 20 small miscellaneous boxes.

They were using miscellaneous  boxes for shipments and many of the shipments contained over 20 items per box, and that can be confusing without proper labeling. One quote the guide said stuck with me he said “sometimes we have customers loosing pieces of hardware because they can get separated from the other boxes and we have to ship them again.”

  • A single order can contain 25 (or more) individual pieces.
  • Some things such as the monitors, and registers are all sent in manufacturers boxes, no labels are on the outside of the box to identify it as a Toast product.
  • Miscellaneous boxes are used when the toast boxes either don’t fit or are in low stock.
  • Instructions / setup manuals are rare, only a few items have instructions.

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The small boxes that could be used when parts aren’t pre-packaged in boxes from the manufacturer.

The Overall Problem
  • Users did not understand or know how to utilize the information cortex was providing.
  • Churn rate was increasing, and our growth was slowing down… Formerly paying customers were not coming back to the software.
Goal

Use Cortex’s AI to analyze various social pages to get a better understanding of what posts, visuals, and captions are trending in their industry. Then use that trend data to make changes to their work to increase their audience’s engagement on their social posts.

Research

I reached out to a number of existing and cold users asking if they had time and an interest in giving feedback on our product. I conducted these interviews over Zoom. There were a total of 9 participants that offered their time, each interview lasted anywhere from 30-60 minutes.

The participants were from the companies 111Skin, Artragous, BlueBird, Hearst, IBM, Kao, Paychex, Targus, and Utah office of Tourism.

Research Goal
  • Gain an understanding of how we could improve our overall user experience, or to add missing features that were crucial to the users comprehension of our data.
Challenges Faced
  • Many of our existing customers were located outside of our local timezone.  
    • Solution: Schedule user interviews outside of our regular hours (9am-5pm EST) to accommodate our user’s global timezones.
  • Little to no budget to give money as incentives for user interviews.
    • Solution 1: Give product perks to existing users - Free of charge reports, custom PDF presentations for their own use.
    • Solution 2: Accept the interviewees that would take a smaller range of compensation for cold users. This meant our interviewees were from a broader range of professions and positions.
Competitive Analysis
The customers had questions and observations such as:
  • “ Once I have the report, I don’t know what to do with the information in it.”
  • “This is too heavy, I don’t want to dig through all of this to find what I need for my work.”
  • “I feel like I’m wasting my time trying to figure out what this data is trying to tell me.”
  • “It says that this green has a better engagement rate than this blue, what can I do with this information?"

These interviews let me know that the current presentation of our data was not meeting the customer’s needs. The data given was confusing and left the customer with more questions than answers…

  • Often times users would not go any deeper than the top level to get their information. All of the information they were looking for was a few layers deeper into the software.
    • If the user did find the information they were looking for, it was not formatted in a way that made it easy to understand.

Empathy Map

A fulfilled order with over 20 small miscellaneous boxes.

They were using miscellaneous  boxes for shipments and many of the shipments contained over 20 items per box, and that can be confusing without proper labeling. One quote the guide said stuck with me he said “sometimes we have customers loosing pieces of hardware because they can get separated from the other boxes and we have to ship them again.”

  • A single order can contain 25 (or more) individual pieces.
  • Some things such as the monitors, and registers are all sent in manufacturers boxes, no labels are on the outside of the box to identify it as a Toast product.
  • Miscellaneous boxes are used when the toast boxes either don’t fit or are in low stock.
  • Instructions / setup manuals are rare, only a few items have instructions.

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Patterns found:
  • 6 out of 9 participants found that there was a learning curve to using Cortex and understanding the data.
  • 5 out of 9 participants needed assistance finding data within a report.
  • 7 out of 9 participants said that they wanted more audience details for reports.

What’s a Rich Text element?

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Static and dynamic content editing

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

How to customize formatting for each rich text

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Overall findings:
  • Participants were confused by some of the data, they were annoyed with the lack of explanatory info and context throughout the software.
  • Participants looked for easier ways to get to or understand data. They looked for search bars, tooltips, sort and filter options, and various navigation options we were lacking.
  • Participants wanted to know how to use this data in the report.

Needs

A fulfilled order with over 20 small miscellaneous boxes.

They were using miscellaneous  boxes for shipments and many of the shipments contained over 20 items per box, and that can be confusing without proper labeling. One quote the guide said stuck with me he said “sometimes we have customers loosing pieces of hardware because they can get separated from the other boxes and we have to ship them again.”

  • A single order can contain 25 (or more) individual pieces.
  • Some things such as the monitors, and registers are all sent in manufacturers boxes, no labels are on the outside of the box to identify it as a Toast product.
  • Miscellaneous boxes are used when the toast boxes either don’t fit or are in low stock.
  • Instructions / setup manuals are rare, only a few items have instructions.

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User’s needs:
  • A clear breakdown of the info in a simple easy to understand manner.
  • A way to use the info given to positively impact their audience engagement.
Cortex’s needs:
  • Reduce churn rate, increasing customer retention.
  • Increase contract acquisition and renewal.

Ideation

What would help solve our problem of users not understanding or knowing what to do with the information given?

Competitive Analysis

Walking users through new reports would help give them a solid understanding of the information given and Cortex can give them first hand use cases for their information.

Requirements:

  • Cortex employee to put together a walkthrough with customized information based in info from each report.
  • New flows each time that change based on every custom report.
  • Admin flows for creating a walkthrough with custom info.
  • User flows.
  • Cost: large time and resources to implement & upkeep. Will need to be updated on a daily basis or weekly.

Adding tooltips, descriptions, search, sort, & filters will allow the user to get a better understanding of the data points and information. The user can also find their desired info quicker by using search, sort, & filters.

Requirements:

  • Comb the software, log all data points that are missing info
  • Write all tooltips, implement
  • Cost: Minimal time and resources to implement & upkeep.

A tutorial will give new and existing users a top level understanding of how to use Cortex and how to understand their information.

Requirements:

  • Create a walkthrough of the software at the most basic level with a walkthrough of each top level section of the reports.
  • This would need to be updated every time the software changes.
  • Cost: Large time and resources to implement and upkeep. Will need to be updated regularly.

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Recommendations on how to use the information given will help the user understand how they can utilize the given info to improve their creative work.

Requirements:

  • Identify all potential swaps.
  • A Cortex employee would need to create every suggestion.
  • New page structure and navigation option for suggestions.
  • Notification of new suggestions.
  • User flows.
  • Admin flows for creating suggestions.
  • Cost: Large time and resources to implement, minimal to upkeep. It will run itself with minimal human effort once it is implemented and wont need to be updated regularly.

We moved forward with The recommendations idea and while that was in design and development, we started implementing tooltips throughout the software.

Tutorials and walkthroughs would be too cumbersome to take on with sich a small team and little resources.

Recommendations

Recommendations are suggestions given to the user to swap image contents, colors, aspect ratio, and/or caption keywords and emojis to increase audience engagement on their posts. This gives the user a clear way to utilize the information in Cortex’s reports, this information is backed up by factual data from the analyzed social pages.

Requirements for creating recommendations:
  • Define recommendations: Image contents, colors, aspect ratio, and caption keywords/emojis the users can change within their posts to increase their audience engagement.
  • Create the user flows & look and feel of the recommendations:
    • The user view.
    • Emails sent to the user when new recommendations are created.
    • The Cortex employee’s (Admin) view.
      • Create the step by step process for Cortex employees to make recommendations.

A fulfilled order with over 20 small miscellaneous boxes.

They were using miscellaneous  boxes for shipments and many of the shipments contained over 20 items per box, and that can be confusing without proper labeling. One quote the guide said stuck with me he said “sometimes we have customers loosing pieces of hardware because they can get separated from the other boxes and we have to ship them again.”

  • A single order can contain 25 (or more) individual pieces.
  • Some things such as the monitors, and registers are all sent in manufacturers boxes, no labels are on the outside of the box to identify it as a Toast product.
  • Miscellaneous boxes are used when the toast boxes either don’t fit or are in low stock.
  • Instructions / setup manuals are rare, only a few items have instructions.

‍

User view of Recommendations

Admin view of Recommendations

  • Create new recommendations
  • Edit existing recommendations
  • Delete existing recommendations
A closer look at the differnet types of recommendations

How is a recommendation created by admins?

Each delivery is a big box that contains multiple little boxes. Each large box will be logged and its contents would be in an inventory list below.

Notifying the user of new recommendations

Once a new recommendation is created the user be notified of it by email, to entice them to log back into the software.

I created an email template to be used to notify the user of a new recommendation and give them a glimpse at one of the created recommendations. Prompting them back into the software to see the rest of the recommendations.

Impacts of the new designs

  • Cortex saw an increase in customer retention and onboarding of new customers.
    • These new customers had less questions about the data, and how they could implement it into their workflows.
    • With insight into how to use the data to positively influence their audience engagement already paying customers were more willing to renew contracts.‍
  • Monthly active users grew 20% after changes were implemented.
  • Recommendations on how users can change their posts increased user satisfaction with the software. We saw more users regularly coming back into the software to see these recommendations.
  • Our new designs increased the conversion rate of free to paid customers by 5%.

What I learned

  • I had a somewhat hard time working with the development team due to the time zone difference and information being in different locations (Figma, Slack, Email, Asana, Google Docs). The solutions I learned to implement were:
    • To occasionally be available after my regular working hours to setup meetings with Dev. to go over any questions/clarifications needed for their work.
    • I suggested we start having all of our information for projects in one place, Asana would have a brief summary of the project with a Google Doc. attached, the details would be listed there. This included a link to the Figma files, UX documentation, UI changes, style guides, etc.
  • I learned to get insight from a variety of people on the team while working on my designs instead of afterwards. This allowed me to get constructive criticism and pivot my designs when needed before getting too far into it.
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  • This was the first time I led the UX research of such a large project. I learned to be confident in my skills and get more comfortable asking why multiple times to get to the bottom of what the user really needs/wants out of the software.
  • I learned to be confident in my work, that it can positively impact the users overall experience with the software.

Going Forward

Ultimately Cortex failed to secure funding and the company shut down in early 2023. If Cortex had been successful this is what I would have done if given the time…Work closer with other teams (Dev., Executives, Sales):Revisiting

Work closer with other teams (Dev., Executives, Sales):
  • Much of my work was done independently with feedback from other teams towards the end of the design process, I would get other teams involved in the process earlier on.
    • The Developers would be able to give insights on some constraints within my designs early in the process. I could change things earlier on, saving time for both myself and the Dev. team.
    • Both the Executives and the Sales team will have first hand knowledge into how the users feel about the software, and how we could potentially change things t help ease any pain points.
Revisit designs after some time to see if they still met the user’s & Cortex’s needs:
  • I would revisit these designs to make sure they were continuing to meeting the user’s & Cortex’s needs.
    • If these changes no longer meet the required needs, I would restart the process of doing user research and refining it further.
Work towards a fully functional mobile app:
  • I think the software would have gotten more use and traction if we had put resources into creating a mobile app from the start. It was a work in progress, but it was not the priority.